River systems provide various ecosystem services that are crucial for sustaining rapidly expanding population centers across Asia. Despite far-reaching environmental impacts, human-induced perturbations such as impoundments and water pollution have rarely been linked to carbon export and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Asian river systems. An international collaborative research project has been initiated by funding from the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) with the primary aim of building a research network on carbon fluxes through Asian river systems to assess water pollution impacts on Asian rivers as a C source.

An annual workshop will be held in a regional hub – Mekong (Southeast), Yellow River (East Asia), and Ganges-Brahmaputra (South) – to synthesise long-term data available from local sources and to test carbon monitoring techniques during a field trip. The objectives of the first workshop in Phnom Penh include: to obtain an overview of the current status and past studies on water pollution and its impacts on riverine C fluxes in each region; to find out long-term data available from local sources with an ultimate goal to produce regional-scale estimates of the riverine C export and GHG emissions; and to disseminate standardized C monitoring methods among project members and other workshop participants through a technical session combined with a field trip. Project members and invited speakers who have worked on aquatic carbon dynamics (e.g., Drs. David Butman and Gordon Holtgrieve, University of Washington) will build ad-hoc review teams to publish review papers identifying key issues and future research needs.