The Mekong River Delta is a lush landscape dominated by rice paddies and massive mangrove forests. It’s one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, where you’ll find unique species like the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin and the Mekong giant catfish.
This winding labyrinth of waterways filled with wonders is also one of the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems. As salinity in the delta increases due to various factors, what will the impacts be? Not only on the environment, but on the 17 million people that call the region home and depend on the water for life and livelihood?
These are the questions at the heart of Dr. Wendy Jepson’s latest research. Jepson, professor of geography and director of the Environment and Sustainability Initiative and Environmental Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been studying water insecurity and the human-environment relationship since 2008. She was recently selected for a prestigious Fulbright Award to expand this work in the Mekong River Delta, where she will be affiliated with the Mekong Institute at Cần Thơ University.
Jepson will use the data generated in Southeast Asia as the foundation of a book project about increasing salinity at a global scale. “The Mekong is Ground Zero in this change,” she said, noting that salt is currently reshaping environments worldwide.
Several factors are transforming water quality in the Mekong Delta, including climate change, sea‑level rise, drought, upstream dam construction, groundwater extraction, and land subsidence. These cascading forces are pushing saltwater inland and threatening freshwater supplies, agriculture, and food security in the region.
“The Mekong watershed is massive,” said Jepson. “The river starts in the Tibetan Plateau, flows through several countries in Southeast Asia, and then empties in the South China Sea. It’s a highly complex hydrological, ecological and human system, and it’s been undergoing change for many years. It is accelerating in terms of transformation.” Jepson is interested in studying how “different actors in this system manage, govern and adapt to this invisible challenge.”
Changes for People and Planet
Jepson’s research on the human element of water insecurity began long before population growth in water-scarce cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas made it a frequent headline in the United States. For 15 years, she has collaborated with anthropologist Amber Wutich, a MacArthur Genius Fellow who teaches at Arizona State. “She and I have been on this journey together. We transformed the intellectual architecture and the methodologies on how we study water from an experiential standpoint,” she explained, noting that previous research looked at the environment and the people separately. Jepson and Wutich’s work has created a new way to examine the intersection of population and place, scaling from the macro to the micro to explore water issues through an interdisciplinary lens. Their research examines how humans impact the environment, as well as how changes to the environment impact humans at the population level and the individual household.
Her research program is also connected to a $4.6 million grant Jepson was recently awarded in collaboration with Darrel Wanzer-Serano, Director of the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute, and Omar Rivera. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the grant advances humanities-based, transdisciplinary, and community-engaged research on environmental crises and their disproportionate social and economic effects on vulnerable populations. She is also leading a collaboration to develop a water insecurity metric for the United States.
“Professor Jepson’s fundamental research produces knowledge that is critical to understanding the world around us so that we can take action when needed,” said Emily Pentzer, senior associate dean for research in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Her recognition as a Fulbright Scholar highlights not only the timeliness of her work but also the impact it can have — from across the globe to here in Texas.”
Not a Sexy Crisis Narrative
Jepson is not interested in telling another hand-wringing climate crisis story. Instead, she wants to explore how one small change, the percentage of salt in each drop of water, impacts everything else. “What we are seeing is this environmental change at a global scale,” she said. “We are changing the composition of water in terms of its molecular form. It’s so significant, but it’s invisible, and we don’t have a framework to talk about it. There are so many interesting dimensions to think about with how salinity changes will affect people’s lives.”
Through this work, Jepson intends to bring the research to the human scale, to tell the stories of the people alongside the science. It’s the most ambitious project she’s ever taken on, and she is excited about all that she does not yet know. She expects it might take her five to 10 years to explore this work fully. “I’ve been thinking about it for years, and I’m finally doing it. It’s huge,” she said. “This is an important story that hasn’t been told.”
Our relationship to salt is an essential part of human evolution, Jepson explained. “Humans have mobilized salts for a very long time. We use it. We trade it. We transform it. What has changed is the scale, pace and intensity of mobilizing various salts. How that impacts the environment and livelihoods is different now. I want to understand that. No change can happen until we understand the scope of the situation and give words to it.”
Jepson recognizes the challenge of this work is that salt isn't “sexy.”
“It's not polar bears on a melting ice cap,” she said. It is hard to capture and explain why shifting salinity will have such an outsized impact. The Mekong Delta is vital to telling this story, as it is straightforward to tie salinity changes in the region to consequences for those who live near and depend on the river, from the rice farmers to the salt producers to those who live on houseboats and fish for daily sustenance.
Jepson will travel to Vietnam in the summer of 2026 to set up her Fulbright research, then will return to Aggieland to teach during the fall semester. The Fulbright Award will support her as she spends the spring 2027 term gathering data in Vietnam. She plans to organize a study abroad program in May of 2028 for Texas A&M students enrolled in environmental degree programs. Jepson and students will travel up the Mekong River through Vietnam and Cambodia, visiting cultural sites like Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat as well as commercial fisheries and other locations where industry and environment meet. Designed to connect classroom learning with immersive field experience, the program will give students hands-on exposure to climate adaptation, water governance and sustainability challenges.
Fulbright Impact
This is Jepson’s second Fulbright Award. In 2016-2017, the award allowed her to study water insecurity in urban and peri-urban Brazil and teach at the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza. This was a natural fit, since she is fluent in Portuguese. Her work indicated that in times of drought, rural areas see greater impacts and yet are much better at adapting to water scarcity than mid-sized cities, an unexpected finding that created a paradigm shift in the body of research.
The trip to Southeast Asia will be her first field research experience since Brazil. She is excited about this new landscape to explore, as well as the challenge of conducting research in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. She will have a research assistant who is fluent in Vietnamese, and she also plans to leverage technology to assist with translation. While there, she will also lecture at universities throughout Southeast Asia on water issues.
Jepson explained that the Fulbright Award opens doors at universities around the world. “Fulbright is just amazing. It’s providing me with opportunities to develop connections, as well as do the research,” she said.
There are so many questions Jepson is eager to explore. “How are regions adapting to this slow and invisible, yet impactful ecological change and hydrological shift? How does that cascade into how people experience their lives? Who will benefit? Who will pay the cost? Will it be applicable in other places? There’s so much I don’t know, but I have this idea, and I’m excited to see where it leads.”
While this work will take place half a world away, Jepson says it connects to places closer to home. “This project has direct implications for places like Louisiana and Texas,” she explained. “Part of the book will be about drinking water issues, and the Gulf Coast is part of that story.” From increasing salinity upriver in the Mississippi basin threatening municipal water systems to the cascading social and biogeochemical impacts of increased salt ions in freshwater systems, this is a challenge that is widespread and immediate in the developing world, as well as in the U.S.
Jepson intends for her work not to inform policy, but to help people around the world to think about this issue differently. “I hope it will provide new ways to think about the relationship between humans and this dynamic planet we live on,” she said.