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Abstract

Mekong river basin (MRB) has the world's most diverse river ecosystem and largest inland fishery and is home for a hundred million people. Unfortunately, the vital resources of MRB have been significantly degraded over the last decades and will be worse if the current practices and developments continue. Because of the complex ecosystem, economic interests, and political situation, the improvement or even the maintenance of MRB's multiple ecosystem services has to deal with various fields such as land use and management, ecology, conservation, navigation, hydropower, flood control, drinking and irrigation water supply, livelihood development, and transboundary governance. This book takes a state-of-the-art concept of eco-hydrology to frame the review of the system state, data and predictions for quantifying human-induced changes throughout the MRB, and recommendations of solutions to decrease or mitigate the negative effect and enable sustainable development. The used eco-hydrological framework considers not only intimate connections among hydrological processes, ecosystem services, and livelihoods, but also the influences of global–regional environmental changes (ranging from regional development to climate changes) on basin's water resources and ecosystems. This introductory chapter summarizes the book contents and highlights the storyline across chapters using the eco-hydrological framework.