Water

Pilot and Demonstration Activities
Piloting an Adaptive Management Approach to IWRM in Yom River Basin

The Yom River Basin, located in northern Thailand, has a total catchment area of 23,616 square kilometers (km2), is 735 kilometers long, and consists of 11 sub-basins. More than 2 million people living on the Upper, Middle, and Lower Yom depend on the river for their livelihood.

The Department of Water Resources of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) has formulated an integrated plan on water resources management in the Yom river basin. The Yom River Basin Committee (YRBC) is expected to take a prominent role in river basin management. Various agencies concerned with water resources have attempted to solve the problems in the basin, but concrete results have yet to be discovered. These water resources problems include

• Water shortages – for both domestic consumption and agriculture during the wet and dry seasons
• Flooding – that results from overflow and long inundation during the rainy season in urban communities and agricultural areas, particularly in the lower Yom
• Environmental deterioration – that affects water quality, forests and agricultural land, and wetlands

The Yom River presents an opportunity to attempt a new planning and project implementation process in a basin where further development potential exists, where real water resources problems are impacting users directly, and where stakeholders wish to solve problems in participatory ways which expand on the conventional procedures in use in Thailand.

This PDA will pilot an adaptive management approach to integrated water resources management in the Yom river basin. Adaptive management, also known as adaptive resource management, is a structured, iterative process of optimal decision-making in the face of uncertainty, with an aim to reducing uncertainty over time via system monitoring. In this way, decision-making simultaneously maximizes one or more resource objectives and, either passively or actively, accrues information needed to improve future management. Adaptive management is often characterized as “learning by doing.”

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The objectives of the PDA are to:

• test the application of adaptive management approaches to assist local government administrations, including YRBC, and civil society to implement IWRM principles in the Yom River
• foster a consultative process where the relevant agencies are able to cooperate and pool their resources to support IWRM initiatives sponsored by the basin and sub-basin committees

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• Proposal (January 2008)