Valuing Fisheries and Wetlands Using Integrated Economic-Hydrologic Modeling—Mekong River Basin

A healthy water ecosystem is particularly important in the Mekong River Basin, home to 75 million people who depend on its water for rice and fish production. Sound water policies will be needed to sustain current basin ecosystem services, balancing complex and often competing demands for water, including the instream uses of hydropower, navigation, wetlands, and fisheries, maintenance of ecosystems versus the offstream uses of irrigation, and domestic and industrial uses. The paper presents a simplified method and application to incorporate water values for fisheries and wetlands into an integrated economic-hydrologic river basin model to analyze alternative water-using strategies and their implications for riparian countries.