This award supports a planning visit to enable Professor Alex Mayer at the Michigan Technological University to meet with Professor Dang Thanh Ha at Long Nam University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The visit will help develop a collaborative plan for developing an integrated hydrologic-economic model for the Dong Nai River Basin (DNRB). It is the largest national river basin and also the economic center of southern Vietnam. The challenges facing water management in the DNRB include rapid industrial development and urban growth, which is placing growing pressure on urban-industrial water demands and hydropower production. At the same time, these uses directly compete with the agriculture sector. The problems are compounded by an increasing amount of industrial effluents and domestic wastewater, which are discharged directly into the water bodies without prior treatment. Despite several large investments in multipurpose reservoirs, the full irrigation potential of the area has yet to be achieved, due to lack of financial resources, increasing downstream demands, growing salinity problems, poor management of irrigation systems, and lack of coordination among water resources projects in the region. In order to help support coordination of water management in the DNRB, a better understanding of water supply, demand, quality, and its value in various uses is needed. Moreover, understanding the role of alternative policy instruments in alleviating likely future water shortages and continuing deterioration of water quality in the basin will help allocate scarce resources more appropriately across irrigation, hydropower development, and urban water supply demands. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has developed an integrated economic-hydrologic model for the DNRB. During this visit the collaborators will assemble a team responsible for developing and applying the model and plan for further work such as data collection, surveys, and setting scenarios for analysis, etc. The long-term goals of the project are to (1) improve the IFPRI_DNRB model as a decision-support tool by incorporating groundwater and water quality models; and (2) to use the model as a tool for achieving consensus among those with interests in the basin's water resources.
