November 18, 2018

Increasing the sustainability of power production in the Greater Mekong Subregion

Ramboll's Environment & Health Impact Assessment team is providing environmental, climate change risk and social impact assessments for existing client EDF.

Ramboll professionals from France, India, Malaysia and the US are working together on an Asian Development Bank (ADB) project providing four priority regional power interconnections in the Greater Mekong region, to be commissioned from 2022-2030.

Sustainability a priority

For the expanding energy sector to be sustainable, its environmental impacts must be accounted for and incorporated into project design and implementation. Ramboll is providing preliminary environmental and social impact assessments to cross-border transmission lines in Lao, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Mutually beneficial economic and trade benefits

The Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) of Vietnam, Lao PDR, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and China’s Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, was established in 1992 as an ADB initiative to facilitate and promote mutually beneficial economic cooperation among the GMS countries. One goal of the GMS nations is to create a regional power trade to reap economic and technical benefits, and better balance generation resources with electricity needs across national borders.

Ramboll’s role

Our work includes:

  • Providing rapid environmental assessments and initial environmental examination reports
  • Undertaking a climate change risk assessment
  • Providing a social impact assessment including resettlement and indigenous peoples
  • Designing project consultation and information disclosure plan
  • Conducting socioeconomic surveys
  • Conducting a public perception survey to identify public problems and development priorities
  • Reviewing government policies and strategies for poverty reduction and gender development
  • Conducting a poverty and social analysis

Current international EDF projects

This project follows existing projects working for EDF. Ramboll has an ongoing project in Cambodia where we are supervising the implementation of transmission and distribution lines (the KK-KCK Project) during the design and construction stages and during testing and commissioning. The end client is the finance institution AFD (French Development Agency).