Members of the America’s Wetland Foundation are in Vietnam this week to collaborate on river management. Dutch experts are also participating.
America’s Wetland Foundation Managing Director Val Marmillion says Vietnam is facing some of the same problems in the Mekong Delta that Louisiana has with subsidence and rising sea levels. He says the Vietnamese are working on green alternatives to levees and dams that have choked off sediment from the Mississippi Delta.
”We go there because I think our country will notice more when we come back and say, ‘In our own country, the United States, a highly developed nation, we have this river system which is in deplorable state and we must act now or we are going to lose it.’ ”
He says experts will review methods of keeping populations safe from flooding while preserving the natural deltas.
“The aim of the conference is to come up with a communique of cooperation, and it’s going to be the first time all of these deltas have worked together to say what we should do to save our deltas and our coastal regions worldwide. Most of the population is moving toward the coast at a time when we have the coast deteriorating — not just in the United States but everywhere."
Updates on the conference findings are available this week at deltas2013.com.
