Mekong River Commission

One of the ways that MRC is helping Member countries to measure, monitor and identify steps to improve sustainable outcomes is the rapid basin-wide hydropower sustainability assessment tool (RSAT). The tool is currently undergoing field trials in tributary basins in Mekong countries coordinated by the MRC.

The basin / sub-basin assessment and dialogue tool is the product of several years of conceptualization, preparation, and stakeholder engagement in the Mekong region under the partnership initiative called the Environment Critieria for Sustainable Hydropower (ECSHD), whose partners include the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The ECSHD was formalized in 2006 as a platform to develop tools that will assist decision-making for sustainable hydropower development in the Mekong River Basin.

The current version, called RSAT 3 is the outcome of collaboration between the ECSHD partners and the Environmental Cooperation-Asia (ECO-Asia) project of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which contracted with Hydro Tasmania Consulting (HTC) to help prepare the RSAT for implementation in the Mekong River Basin.

It is important to consider sustainable hydropower from the perspective of what needs to be taken into account at all stages of the project-cycle from planning and design through operations. The range of topics and criteria in RSAT reinforce the inherent multi-disciplinary nature of the sustainability hydropower challenge in the Mekong and the acceptance of a step-wise, comprehensive approach.

There is also a voluntary project-specific protocol for hydropower sustainability assessment being developed by a multi-stakeholder Forum at the International level.

One feature of the vision to advance sustainable hydropower in the Mekong, in the longer term, is therefore, to complete sustainability assessments for all existing, planned and proposed hydropower projects contained in the MRC Hydropower Database (135 currently) and for tributary and sub/basins, where these dams are proposed, or currently operate. This will provide MRC Member Countries with greater capacity to monitor and measure progress over time advancing sustainable hydropower in the Mekong, and offer a learning and capacity building platform for the distillation of good practice and the means for adoption.

RSAT is adaptable also for hydropower sustainability assessment in other countries and regions.