18
The News N° 25 - February 2015
ASIA
FRom one conTinenT To anoTHeR
Laos
Integrated BasinManagement for the NamNgum
In the second phase of the pilot project
for IntegratedWaterResourcesManage-
ment in Laos,
carriedoutwith the support of
the Loire-Brittany Water Agency,
IOWater
helped build the capacities of local and natio-
nal teams by:
l
Disseminating the experience acquired on
the NamNgum through the development
of
a methodological guide
to help
teams in the preparation of River Basin
Management Plans and develop tools for
IWRM (catalogue of measures, cost esti-
matemodel, etc).
l
Development of a shared management
model for data on quantitative water
management with application to theNam
Ngum Basin prefiguring the development
of
a National Water Information Sys-
tem.
In February 2014, a delegationof repre-
sentatives of the Loire-Brittany and
Rhine-MeuseWater Agencies and IOWa-
ter, met with the Vice-Minister of Natu-
ral ResourcesandEnvironment,Mr. Sisa-
vath Vithaxay, and key stakeholders in
IWRM implementation at national and
local levels.
It was decided to organize, from 15 to
17 October 2014, in Vientiane, which hosts
the home office of theMekongRiver Commis-
sion, a workshop for exchanging the experi-
ments of 6 countries of the Mekong River
Basin.
4
Meetingwith the Vice-Minister
of Natural Resources
and Environment
Cambodia
Pilot Project for Stung Sen River Basin
This project, coordinated by IOWater
and funded by the Loire-Brittany and
Rhine-Meuse Water Agencies, aims to
improve water governance through the
promotion of IntegratedWater Resour-
ces Management (IWRM) in the Stung
Sen River Basin, main tributary of the
Tonle Sap Lake.
The first 2-year implementation phase gave
encouraging results and enabled the Cambo-
dianAdministration, including
theTonleSap
Authority (TSA)
and
the Ministry of
Water Resources and Meteorology
(MOWRAM),
to make great progress in the
implementation of river basinmanagement.
Stung SenBasin
The work done during the first two years has
indeed focused on the initial stages of
the
planningprocess
(assessment, characteriza-
tion of the basin, definition of the challenges
and objectives for the basin) and on the ele-
mentsnecessary for the initiationof
apartici-
patory process
(study of the framework for
the establishment of a sub-basin committee
for the Stung Sen, the first meetings of this
Committee and the training of itsmembers).
Many field missions have also been made to
move forward on the step of basin characteri-
zation, although a lot of data were non-exis-
tent, especially regarding the use of water
resources and their quality.
Late 2014,
the Stung Sen sub-basin com-
mittee
met for the second time tovalidate the
characterization of the pilot basin and the
launching of a new phase of the project for
another two years.
The work will focus on the following steps of
the planning process, including the establish-
ment of the Program of Measures andMana-
gement Plan for the Stung Sen River Basin, as
well as their estimated costs.
As the first step allowed collecting a large
number of data sets and identifying the data
sources regularly updated by the partners ser-
vices, the TSA nowwhishes to develop its
internal capacity to manage and make the
best use of these data to produce summary
information needed for decision-making and
public information through
a true Water
Information System.
The
MOWRAM
has
an ambitious investment policy for the instal-
lation of newmonitoring stations.
A study tour was also organized in France in
September with the Loire-Brittany Water
Agency (AELB) for three TSA executives in
order to present to the Cambodian the func-
tioning of the FrenchWater Agencies and the
role of the Basin users.
4
The Stung Sen River
