Rising temperatures, rapid urbanization and soaring demand for natural resources threaten deltas worldwide and make them vulnerable to rising seas, subsidence, droughts, floods, and salt intrusion. However, climate change projections in deltas often address climate-driven stressors in isolation and disregard parallel anthropogenic processes, leading to insufficient socio-political drive. Here, using a combination of process-based numerical models that integrate both climatic and anthropogenic environmental stressors, we project salt intrusion within the Mekong mega-Delta, in the next three decades. We assess the relative effects of various drivers and show that anthropogenic forces such as groundwater extraction-induced subsidence and riverbed level incisions due to sediment starvation can increase the salinity-affected areas by 10–27% compared to the present-day situation, while future sea level rise adds another 6–19% increase. These projections provide crucial input for adaptation policy development in the Mekong Delta and the methodology inspires future systemic studies of environmental changes in other deltas.

[1] Travel distance and residence time probability distributions are the key components of stochastic models for coarse sediment transport. Residence time for individual grains is difficult to measure, and residence time distributions appropriate to field and laboratory settings are typically inferred theoretically or from overall transport characteristics. However, bed elevation time series collected using sonar transducers and lidar can be translated into empirical residence time distributions at each elevation in the bed and for the entire bed thickness. Sediment residence time at a given depth can be conceptualized as a stochastic return time process on a finite interval. Overall sediment residence time is an average of residence times at all depths weighted by the likelihood of deposition at each depth. Theory and experiment show that when tracers are seeded on the bed surface, power law residence time will be observed until a timescale set by the bed thickness and bed fluctuation statistics. After this time, the long-time (global) residence time distribution will take exponential form. Crossover time is the time of transition from power law to exponential behavior. The crossover time in flume studies can be on the order of seconds to minutes, while that in rivers can be days to years.