ABSTRACT
Since ancient times, a combination of natural and social forces has produced the Mekong Delta. The delta’s unique waterscape – with its dense maze of canals, extensive horizons of rice fields, village orchards and aquaculture farms – is the result of natural forces such as rain, floods, sedimentation and tides, and of human constructions such as canals and dikes. This made landscape, defined by ongoing canal-building enterprises and other works associated with a rapidly urbanizing human landscape, remains at constant risk of being unmade by the destructive and sediment-spreading natural effects of seasonal floods, erosion from daily tidal fluxes, storms and also the man-made effects from poorly placed dikes and other works. Enormous investments are required to keep the waterways free of sediment for irrigation, flood control and transportation. Yet, the same sediment, associated nutrients contained in it, and water flow are crucially important to agricultural productivity, ecological biodiversity and efforts to avoid coastal erosion.
