Mitigating Impacts and Increasing Benefits from Changing River Courses in Myanmar

The Mitigating Impacts and Increasing Benefits from Changing River Courses in Myanmar service used Sentinel 1 and Landsat 5-8 data to support national agencies monitoring changing river courses and planning riverbank protection measures to mitigate localized impacts to infrastructure (e.g. urban area, agricultural land, rural settlements). In addition, the service enabled investigations of the effects of current structural measures on controlling river morphology change. At the initial stage, the tool covered the entire Ayeyarwady River basin in Myanmar. It has the potential to expand to other locations, considering the need for morphological monitoring services in some sections of the Lower Mekong and their vital role in shaping the river biodiversity.

Rationale

Monsoon rains and tropical cyclones cause a large increase in water levels in Ayeyarwady River during the monsoon season. This causes large geomorphological changes along the 2,000 km length of the river for which no large-scale monitoring mechanism exists. The existing system to monitor morphological change in Myannmar is through field personnel from the Directorate of Water Resources and Improvements of River Systems (DWIR) conducting manual measurements, but the system is too large to be covered entirely by hand. There exists a dire need to rapidly monitor and disseminate information on the seasonal erosion and deposition areas in Ayeyarwady River to plan for riverbank protection works. The DWIR has the mandate to monitor, map and plan for river management activities to minimize loss of lives, property and to maintain navigable channel for transportation. Currently, they are constrained by the absence of a reliable large scale monitoring system which can feed timely information of erosion areas patterns to plan operations. SERVIR-Mekong with technical support from Stockholm Environment Institute co-developed the “Dancing Rivers” tool in response to the existing gap.