River systems provide various ecosystem services that are crucial for sustaining rapidly expanding population centres across Asia. Despite far-reaching environmental impacts, human-induced perturbations such as impoundment 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 supported by 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.

As a core project activity, an annual workshop is held in a regional hub – the Mekong (Southeast Asia), the Ganges-Brahmaputra (South Asia), and the Yellow River (East Asia) – to synthesize literature information and long-term data available from local sources and to conduct an exploratory study during a field trip. The specific objectives of the second workshop in Dhaka include: to obtain an overview of the current status on water pollution and its impacts on riverine C fluxes in the Ganges and other focal river basins; 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 riverine carbon dynamics will build ad-hoc review teams to publish reviews or primary papers identifying key issues and future research needs.