Damned if you do...
A large dam, rising 200 metres and holding back several billion cubic metres of water, can be an undeniably breathtaking spectacle. But while they often feature on lists of the modern engineering wonders of the world, the impact of dams is often far more than visual. Large dams are now found on every continent – and on 60 per cent of the world’s rivers – and environmentalists continue to question whether their benefits are outweighed by the repercussions they cause downstream.
In many countries, large dams are important contributors to development. About half of the world’s large dams were built primarily for irrigation and many powered the Green Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. They’re estimated to contribute directly to 12–16 per cent of global food production, and account for 40 per cent of irrigation. They also provide at least 19 per cent of the world’s electricity, according to the World Bank.
A large dam, according to the logically named International Commission on Large Dams, is defined as more than 15 metres high. Worldwide, their number stood at 5,000 in 1950, three quarters of them in North America, Europe and other industrialised regions. By 2000, there were 45,000 across 140 countries. After a brief hiatus, construction has picked up again, and according to International Rivers, there are now more than 54,000 large dams.
Their impacts are far reaching. ‘It’s strange to think that a dam can cause problems 2,000 kilometres away in a river delta, but it’s true,’ says Dr Jian-hua Meng, WWF’s sustainable hydropower specialist.
Rivers and lakes are more fragmented and degraded than any other ecosystem, according to Diversitas, an international group of biodiversity experts, with extinction rates for freshwater species of animals such as fish, frogs, crocodiles and turtles ‘four to six times higher than their terrestrial and marine cousins’.
DEVASTATING IMPACT
The impact of large dams on poor and rural communities has also often been devastating. ‘Environmental and social issues are the big Achilles heels for dams,’ says Aviva Imhof, campaigns director for International Rivers. ‘In the past, the experience of the impact of dam building globally has been very poor.’
Many dams are in remote areas whose people have a distinct social and cultural identity that not only separates them from energy-seeking urban centres, but exposes them to disadvantage by development. By the mid-2000s – when the most recent figures were produced – between 40 million and 80 million people had been displaced from their homes by dam construction. Since then, Imhof points out, a further 20 million Chinese and ten million Indians have been displaced.
Other studies suggest that the wider impact reaches extraordinary levels. The authors of Lost in Development’s Shadow: The Downstream Human Consequences of Dams conservatively estimate that 472 million people have been directly affected by changes in river flows and ecosystems. Imhof believes that the true figure could be as high as 800 million.
‘Construction is mature – the industry knows how to build dams, but the social side of this engineering is more tricky,’ says Meng. ‘We can’t endorse the building of dams for the benefit of a few while others pay a high price in terms of loss of homes and income. It’s about building the right dams in the right places. Done properly, hydropower can make a powerful contribution to energy-poor people and to carbon-free energy on a global scale. But if you leave a downstream river dry, or with a constant flow –something that’s unnatural – you don’t have the river dynamics for keeping wetlands alive.’
TIPPING POINT
And some of the world’s most iconic rivers are set to be affected. The Amazon has had a lot thrown at it but now, in addition to deforestation, it faces an onslaught of dam building. The Brazilian government has plans to build more than 60 large dams along the river and its tributaries over the next 20 years, and hundreds more are planned for the wider Amazon basin.
The most controversial of these is the gargantuan Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River, a major tributary of the Amazon. Funding for what represents the world’s third-largest hydroelectric project was approved last autumn to the tune of US$10.8billion.
The Brazilian government says that the dam will help to meet the energy demanded by its booming economy. US-based NGO Amazon Watch says that 80 per cent of the flow of the Xingu River will be diverted into artificial channels and canals, devastating the riverine ecosystem and an extensive area of the Brazilian rainforest, displace 20,000 people, and imperil indigenous tribes that depend on the river.
Could Belo Monte be a tipping point? Every dam in the Brazilian Amazon opens up tracts of deforestation as colonisers follow the constructors and plant soy and graze cattle. ‘If it goes ahead, small dams, mining companies and oil exploitation will all be much easier to allow,’ says Maira Irigary of Amazon Watch.
Affected communities will include indigenous people, fisherman, boat drivers, small-scale farmers, brick makers and miners. ‘While indigenous peoples won’t be flooded, they will lose access to water, river transportation, fish, hunting grounds, and their culture and way of life,’ Irigary says.
DEVELOPMENT DEAL
Across the Pacific Ocean, another of the world’s mighty rivers faces similar challenges. China has already constructed five dams along the upper reaches of the 4,800-kilometre Mekong, while 11 dams are planned for the lower Mekong, including nine in Laos, a country galvanised by data that suggests only ten per cent of the lower Mekong’s hydroelectric potential has been exploited.
Construction began on Laos’s Xayaburi dam last November. The attraction for this energy-hungry and cash-poor country is clear: Xayaburi could generate an extra US$15billion, create 400,000 new construction jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030. The Lao government says it will reinvest the income – mainly from Thailand – in development projects.
But the repercussions could be culturally and environmentally devastating. ‘Sixty million people rely on the lower Mekong for their livelihoods; millions use it to catch fish, for their primary source of protein,’ says Kirk Herbertson, Southeast Asia policy coordinator for International Rivers. ‘What happens upstream in China and Laos has a profound effect downstream in Cambodia and Vietnam. The dam will slow the movement of sediment downstream – which is important for farmers, particularly for growing rice in the delta in Vietnam.
‘Millions of people live in forest communities along the Mekong – they fish and grow crops along the banks in river-bank gardens,’ he continues. ‘They grow and gather their own food. Half of these gardens will be inundated by the dam. This isn’t just an environmental issue, but a cultural, human rights and economic one.’
MEKONG MADNESS
The Xayaburi dam is proceeding despite a hugely critical environmental-impact report commissioned by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which is responsible for smoothing out trans-boundary disputes and promoting sustainable use of the river. The report called for a ten-year moratorium on all dam building along the Mekong. It concluded that the impacts of the proposed 11 mainstream dams ‘could be very severe’, be a ‘near-total barrier to fish migration’ and affect two of the Mekong’s flagship species – the giant catfish and the Irrawaddy dolphin. ‘This scenario creates the potential for both very high economic benefits but also much higher environmental and social impacts’ said the authors.
In response, the MRC points to mitigation measures such as a ‘ladder’ to help fish bypass the dam and reach spawning grounds, and engineering to flush sediment downstream. But the critics aren’t convinced. ‘The Xayaburi dam was the MRC’s first big test – and it failed it,’ says Herbertson.
Even so, Herbertson acknowledges that Laos’s case for development makes it ‘a little trickier’ to steadfastly oppose hydropower projects. ‘Laos needs revenue to develop – that’s unarguable – and it sees hydropower as a way to bring in revenue quickly. Laos has the right to develop and that perhaps does include some hydropower, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of its neighbours.’
POLITICAL PROJECTS
What Belo Monte and Xayaburi highlight – to the frustration of environmentalists – is the absence of globally binding regulations for dam construction. Back in 2000, the dam industry came close to being subject to international law. The World Commission on Dams (WCD), set up in 1998 by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, produced 26 guidelines on issues such as sustaining rivers and livelihoods, recognising entitlements and sharing benefits, ensuring compliance and sharing rivers for peace, development, and security. International Rivers describes the WCD’s recommendations as ‘a gold standard’ – but the UN never accepted the recommendations in full and the WCD was disbanded.
‘There are dams out there that haven’t had a huge impact,’ says Imhof. ‘But the problem is that the industry has never constructed a dam to the recommendations of the WCD. There are no examples of dams that comply with those transparency guidelines. There are many more than should be the case that don’t implement local laws and have no mitigation measures.
‘There’s a real problem with accountability,’ he continues. ‘Brazil’s legislation on dams looks good on paper, but dams are such political projects – there’s a big revolving door between the political bureaucracy and the dam companies.’
POSITIVE STEP
A major step in the right direction appears to have been taken with the publication in 2011 of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol, supported by NGOs such as WWF and the Nature Conservancy, governments, banks, developers and operators, and co-ordinated by the International Hydropower Association (IHA). ‘When there is any change in land use, there will be impacts,’ says Richard Taylor, executive director of the IHA. ‘It’s essential to involve the potentially affected communities in the process of investigating these impacts. Where resettlement is unavoidable, community-led decision making on plans made in partnership with the developer is likely to be the most successful in implementation.’
While the protocol has no mandatory powers, Meng believes that its 23 guidelines, on issues such as displacement and economic and environmental impacts, still have teeth, and will raise standards through the incentives involved. ‘It offers clear guidelines and best practice but, crucially, it’s a valuable tool for banks – it tells them what to look out for when they’re deciding where to put their investment. It’s effectively a risk-assessment tool.’
The World Bank, which has observer status for the protocol, believes that it’s the option that works best in the real world. ‘Because it isn’t binding, you’re increasing the chances that people will participate, and that over time it, will become a badge of honour that people will want to be associated with,’ says Julia Bucknall, manager of the World Bank’s central water unit.
‘The thinking about sediment management, and the environmental and social aspects, has improved dramatically in the past ten years,’ she adds. ‘The debate has moved on, from simply giving people cash, or saying “Here’s a field, we’ll irrigate it for you.” It’s about giving people a real choice, with roads and healthpoints.
‘We’ve learnt how to work with local communities so that those who are displaced have real, enhanced livelihood options,’ she continues. ‘We have to look at household dynamics so that we don’t empower one part of the family at the expense of another – by giving cash to the male head of the house, who may invest the money in a way that doesn’t benefit the rest of the family.’
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Norwegian engineering company Statkraft, a signatory to the protocol, believes that this approach and the adoption of sustainability principles laid down by the International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, has helped to minimise the impact of dams in Laos. A major challenge, says Dr Stephen Sparkes, vice president for corporate responsibility at Stakraft, is persuading company bosses that the investment is worth it. ‘If something makes commercial sense as well as environmental sense, then it’s easier to sell,’ he says. ‘But if it isn’t financially profitable, then it may not be satisfactory for some hydropower investors. If you’re interested in social and environmental responsibility, it doesn’t come free.’
Overall, Sparkes reckons that the social and environmental overheads on a conventional dam project are between two and five per cent, but investing to meet meaningful sustainability standards raises overheads to between five and ten per cent. ‘It’s difficult to demonstrate whether investing two per cent more in social responsibility gives you a two per cent higher chance of getting the next job,’ he says. ‘But it gives you a smoother ride than a company that just goes in and is only concerned about making money. A spreadsheet will show you the cost of employing another six people to deal with social responsibility issues, but it won’t show the money you’ve wasted and lost in meetings and additional work because you failed to spend an extra US$1million on social responsibility.’
However, International Rivers has decided to stay outside the protocol. ‘It’s effectively greenwashing,’ says Imhof. ‘The protocol doesn’t have the support of local communities, and it’s more of a scorecard than a set of standards. You can get a low mark in one area, a high one in another, and still be considered sustainable.’
Taylor acknowledges that there is room for improvement and feels that the industry – and the wider media – should encourage progress by highlighting dams that are built responsibly. ‘In the selection processes for tendering, financing and permitting, there needs to be a distinct advantage given to entities that have a good track record in corporate social responsibility and sustainability performance,’ he says.
CHINESE REVOLUTION
Yet concern among environmentalists over standards remains widespread, in large part, they argue, because most dams are underwritten by states or private companies. The World Bank, once a large financer of dams, now funds just two to five per cent of large dams. ‘We believe that the best way for us is to fund examples of how to build dams right or better, and we work with others to share these standards and experience,’ says Bucknall. ‘We suspect that we have more impact this way than if we run around funding many more projects.’
There are no prizes for guessing which country is the driving force behind the flurry of mega dams. Chinese companies and banks are now the biggest builders and financers of global dam construction; according to International Rivers, China is building 312 dams in 72 different countries.
This means that China stands at the heart of the debate about just how well the dam-building industry is governed. In a report published last year, The New Great Walls, International Rivers found both good and bad in China’s dam building. ‘There have been some positive developments,’ the report notes. ‘Sinohydro, a state-owned company and the world’s largest dam builder, has adopted an environmental policy with a view to addressing its international responsibilities… Despite this, many Chinese hydropower companies continue to pursue projects that have significant and devastating impacts for host communities and the environment.’
Other NGOs are less ambivalent. ‘Every second dam is being built either in China or by Chinese companies,’ acknowledges WWF’s Meng. ‘But the days are gone when China looked to fill the market niche for dirty jobs that involved cheap stuff done quickly. We can see that they’re no longer just interested in delivering a project to a basic standard – they’re looking to deliver state-of-the-art projects. They’re in contact with the rest of the world and want to excel.’
The key, according to Dr Jeff Opperman, a freshwater scientist at the Nature Conservancy, is that planning for dams must consider the entire river basin – not just the immediate impacts of a single dam. This way, he argues, ‘a much broader set of solutions becomes available and the possibilities for win–win solutions increases’.
Opperman points to the experience of dam building on the Penobscot River in Maine, USA. Here, a range of interests – the Penobscot Indian Nation, state and federal agencies, and conservation organisations – have worked with a hydropower company to identify solutions for both energy production and ecosystem restoration at the scale of the entire river basin. ‘The resulting plan features the removal of two dams on the main river and the addition of state-of-the-art fish-passage facilities on a third dam,’ says Opperman. These measures would open up nearly 1,600 kilometres of habitat for endangered Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and river herring.
DROUGHT AND FLOODS
Because they play such a huge role in influencing the flow of water, dams find themselves tied up with the debate over how climate change is likely to unfold. Recent research suggests that many dams in Southern Africa are utterly inappropriate for a changing climate and may well exacerbate the impact of such change.
In A Risky Climate for Southern African Hydro, an International Rivers report on the hydrological risks associated with Zambezi River Basin dams, Dr Richard Beilfuss argues that Southern Africa’s largest rivers are ill-prepared to withstand the shocks of a changing climate. The entire Zambezi River Basin, he says, is highly susceptible to extreme droughts (often multi-year droughts) and floods that occur nearly every decade.
The result could be uneconomic dams that under-perform in the face of more extreme drought, and more dangerous dams that haven’t been designed to handle increasingly damaging floods. ‘Climatic uncertainty must be incorporated into dam design, to avoid the hazards of over- or under-designed infrastructure and financial risk,’ Beilfuss writes.
Changing weather patterns may also bring economic problems for the underwriters of dams. ‘Many developers aren’t aware of this yet,’ says Meng. ‘They’ve been taught to look at river- and water-flow patterns from the past 300 years to judge what will happen in the next 200 years – but that no longer applies. There’s no certainty any more.’
And large dams may also be net emitters of greenhouse gases. In the tropics, large reservoirs can become repositories for decaying matter that emits large quantities of methane. ‘Hydropower plants take the water from the bottom of the reservoir, which is where the methane is most concentrated – that is then released when the water turns the turbines,’ says Imhof.
CHANGING ROLES
The World Bank’s view, however, is that dams are still essential. ‘It seems strange when people say that as there may be less water we shouldn’t build dams,’ says Bucknall. ‘Storage will be at a premium, and dams and hydropower will become all the more important. Even if the water level is too low for the turbines to turn, at least there will be a reservoir of water that can be used for something. The role of dams and hydropower in preventing droughts and floods and creating systems for irrigation becomes so much more important.’
Versatility isn’t something that comes to mind when you think of dams, but Bucknall believes that they will have to be productive in different ways. ‘There’s a lot of room to do much better with the dams we have,’ she says. ‘A lot of dams are single purpose – and 90 per cent of them don’t produce hydropower – so there’s room for an expansion of multi-purpose dams. The links between water and energy will become much more explicit and will have to be managed much more carefully. Water security will be a huge political and social issue as climate change, a growing population and economic growth come together.’
Meng is also optimistic that dams will have more positive than negative impacts. ‘The performance of dam building will improve because the knowledge is there now,’ he says. ‘There’s a recognition of the rights of indigenous people. Nobody can now say, “We didn’t know, the science wasn’t there.”
‘There will be black-sheep cases and governance issues, where corruption means that things don’t play out in the way a logical person would expect,’ he continues. ‘We just need the political and economic will and power.’
Others see the emergence of China, Brazil and other nations as posing new, worrying, threats. ‘We’re in a much more challenging environment than we were 10–15 years ago,’ says Imhof. ‘The rise of China, Brazil and Thailand is changing the scene – these are countries that have a lot of money to throw around for major projects. But I’m an optimist – a lot of dams being built aren’t as bad as those of the past. But given the threats of climate change, we can’t afford to dam and divert the world’s rivers.’
BOX: THREE GORGES' LEGACY
The Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River – completed last year – is reckoned to be the most gargantuan engineering project in human history. For many environmentalists it’s also the most notorious.
The dam, which took 18 years to build, holds a clutch of dubious records, including the most people displaced by a dam (more than 1.2 million) and the most settlements flooded (13 cities, 140 towns, 1,350 villages; along with hundreds of factories, mines and waste dumps). This legacy, along with the influence of big industrial centres upstream, is creating, according to International Rivers, ‘a festering bog of effluent, silt, industrial pollutants and rubbish’.
Were that not enough, it seems that the dam’s 600-kilometre-long reservoir has been responsible for landslips, wider ground movements and tremors. According to China Daily, 243 dangerous geological events have occurred in the reservoir area, and 9,324 sites are potentially threatened by such hazards.
A recent report posted on China Dialogue, an independent environmental website, said the dam had changed the climate around the reservoir and downstream. The dam, it argued, has created a low-pressure zone that affects normal atmospheric flows, triggering extreme weather events, such as the 2006 and 2010 droughts, and even the 2008 blizzards. In 2011, the Chinese government made a rare public concession, noting that the dam had ‘caused some urgent problems in terms of environmental protection, the prevention of geological hazards and the welfare of the relocated communities’.
Even so, the Three Gorges is but one piece of the jigsaw. The Yangtze watershed alone – including four of its tributaries – has 103 dams either built, being constructed or in the pipeline. Across China, the government has announced new hydropower projects amounting to 140 gigawatts – equivalent to the output of six Three Gorges dams.
BOX: WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?
The immediate response to those who challenge the need for building so many large dams is obvious: how else do you meet what is an unarguable demand for energy? ‘We would never promote the idea that no dams should ever be built,’ says Aviva Imhof of International Rivers. ‘That would be ludicrous. In a carbon-constrained world, hydropower could play a part in energy production.’
However, starting from a basic principle of energy reduction would help. According to International Rivers, reasonably applied energy-efficiency measures in Brazil would save five times as much energy as would be produced by the Belo Monte dam. ‘The problem for a lot of countries,’ says Imhof, ‘is that you have an enormous bureaucracy that has built up to produce and approve dams. So what do they do? You build more dams.’
Alternatives depend on regions and local conditions. With 90 per cent of its electricity coming from hydropower, Kenya has been over-reliant on dams, as it has found to its cost in recent years of drought. Now the country is pursuing wind power ahead of new dams, with a 310-megawatt wind farm due to begin generation this year. Kenya is also keen to exploit its abundant resources of geothermal energy, which the government says has the potential to produce 7,000 megawatts.
February 2013
In many countries, large dams are important contributors to development. About half of the world’s large dams were built primarily for irrigation and many powered the Green Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. They’re estimated to contribute directly to 12–16 per cent of global food production, and account for 40 per cent of irrigation. They also provide at least 19 per cent of the world’s electricity, according to the World Bank.
A large dam, according to the logically named International Commission on Large Dams, is defined as more than 15 metres high. Worldwide, their number stood at 5,000 in 1950, three quarters of them in North America, Europe and other industrialised regions. By 2000, there were 45,000 across 140 countries. After a brief hiatus, construction has picked up again, and according to International Rivers, there are now more than 54,000 large dams.
Their impacts are far reaching. ‘It’s strange to think that a dam can cause problems 2,000 kilometres away in a river delta, but it’s true,’ says Dr Jian-hua Meng, WWF’s sustainable hydropower specialist.
Rivers and lakes are more fragmented and degraded than any other ecosystem, according to Diversitas, an international group of biodiversity experts, with extinction rates for freshwater species of animals such as fish, frogs, crocodiles and turtles ‘four to six times higher than their terrestrial and marine cousins’.
DEVASTATING IMPACT
The impact of large dams on poor and rural communities has also often been devastating. ‘Environmental and social issues are the big Achilles heels for dams,’ says Aviva Imhof, campaigns director for International Rivers. ‘In the past, the experience of the impact of dam building globally has been very poor.’
Many dams are in remote areas whose people have a distinct social and cultural identity that not only separates them from energy-seeking urban centres, but exposes them to disadvantage by development. By the mid-2000s – when the most recent figures were produced – between 40 million and 80 million people had been displaced from their homes by dam construction. Since then, Imhof points out, a further 20 million Chinese and ten million Indians have been displaced.
Other studies suggest that the wider impact reaches extraordinary levels. The authors of Lost in Development’s Shadow: The Downstream Human Consequences of Dams conservatively estimate that 472 million people have been directly affected by changes in river flows and ecosystems. Imhof believes that the true figure could be as high as 800 million.
‘Construction is mature – the industry knows how to build dams, but the social side of this engineering is more tricky,’ says Meng. ‘We can’t endorse the building of dams for the benefit of a few while others pay a high price in terms of loss of homes and income. It’s about building the right dams in the right places. Done properly, hydropower can make a powerful contribution to energy-poor people and to carbon-free energy on a global scale. But if you leave a downstream river dry, or with a constant flow –something that’s unnatural – you don’t have the river dynamics for keeping wetlands alive.’
TIPPING POINT
And some of the world’s most iconic rivers are set to be affected. The Amazon has had a lot thrown at it but now, in addition to deforestation, it faces an onslaught of dam building. The Brazilian government has plans to build more than 60 large dams along the river and its tributaries over the next 20 years, and hundreds more are planned for the wider Amazon basin.
The most controversial of these is the gargantuan Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River, a major tributary of the Amazon. Funding for what represents the world’s third-largest hydroelectric project was approved last autumn to the tune of US$10.8billion.
The Brazilian government says that the dam will help to meet the energy demanded by its booming economy. US-based NGO Amazon Watch says that 80 per cent of the flow of the Xingu River will be diverted into artificial channels and canals, devastating the riverine ecosystem and an extensive area of the Brazilian rainforest, displace 20,000 people, and imperil indigenous tribes that depend on the river.
Could Belo Monte be a tipping point? Every dam in the Brazilian Amazon opens up tracts of deforestation as colonisers follow the constructors and plant soy and graze cattle. ‘If it goes ahead, small dams, mining companies and oil exploitation will all be much easier to allow,’ says Maira Irigary of Amazon Watch.
Affected communities will include indigenous people, fisherman, boat drivers, small-scale farmers, brick makers and miners. ‘While indigenous peoples won’t be flooded, they will lose access to water, river transportation, fish, hunting grounds, and their culture and way of life,’ Irigary says.
DEVELOPMENT DEAL
Across the Pacific Ocean, another of the world’s mighty rivers faces similar challenges. China has already constructed five dams along the upper reaches of the 4,800-kilometre Mekong, while 11 dams are planned for the lower Mekong, including nine in Laos, a country galvanised by data that suggests only ten per cent of the lower Mekong’s hydroelectric potential has been exploited.
Construction began on Laos’s Xayaburi dam last November. The attraction for this energy-hungry and cash-poor country is clear: Xayaburi could generate an extra US$15billion, create 400,000 new construction jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030. The Lao government says it will reinvest the income – mainly from Thailand – in development projects.
But the repercussions could be culturally and environmentally devastating. ‘Sixty million people rely on the lower Mekong for their livelihoods; millions use it to catch fish, for their primary source of protein,’ says Kirk Herbertson, Southeast Asia policy coordinator for International Rivers. ‘What happens upstream in China and Laos has a profound effect downstream in Cambodia and Vietnam. The dam will slow the movement of sediment downstream – which is important for farmers, particularly for growing rice in the delta in Vietnam.
‘Millions of people live in forest communities along the Mekong – they fish and grow crops along the banks in river-bank gardens,’ he continues. ‘They grow and gather their own food. Half of these gardens will be inundated by the dam. This isn’t just an environmental issue, but a cultural, human rights and economic one.’
MEKONG MADNESS
The Xayaburi dam is proceeding despite a hugely critical environmental-impact report commissioned by the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which is responsible for smoothing out trans-boundary disputes and promoting sustainable use of the river. The report called for a ten-year moratorium on all dam building along the Mekong. It concluded that the impacts of the proposed 11 mainstream dams ‘could be very severe’, be a ‘near-total barrier to fish migration’ and affect two of the Mekong’s flagship species – the giant catfish and the Irrawaddy dolphin. ‘This scenario creates the potential for both very high economic benefits but also much higher environmental and social impacts’ said the authors.
In response, the MRC points to mitigation measures such as a ‘ladder’ to help fish bypass the dam and reach spawning grounds, and engineering to flush sediment downstream. But the critics aren’t convinced. ‘The Xayaburi dam was the MRC’s first big test – and it failed it,’ says Herbertson.
Even so, Herbertson acknowledges that Laos’s case for development makes it ‘a little trickier’ to steadfastly oppose hydropower projects. ‘Laos needs revenue to develop – that’s unarguable – and it sees hydropower as a way to bring in revenue quickly. Laos has the right to develop and that perhaps does include some hydropower, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of its neighbours.’
POLITICAL PROJECTS
What Belo Monte and Xayaburi highlight – to the frustration of environmentalists – is the absence of globally binding regulations for dam construction. Back in 2000, the dam industry came close to being subject to international law. The World Commission on Dams (WCD), set up in 1998 by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, produced 26 guidelines on issues such as sustaining rivers and livelihoods, recognising entitlements and sharing benefits, ensuring compliance and sharing rivers for peace, development, and security. International Rivers describes the WCD’s recommendations as ‘a gold standard’ – but the UN never accepted the recommendations in full and the WCD was disbanded.
‘There are dams out there that haven’t had a huge impact,’ says Imhof. ‘But the problem is that the industry has never constructed a dam to the recommendations of the WCD. There are no examples of dams that comply with those transparency guidelines. There are many more than should be the case that don’t implement local laws and have no mitigation measures.
‘There’s a real problem with accountability,’ he continues. ‘Brazil’s legislation on dams looks good on paper, but dams are such political projects – there’s a big revolving door between the political bureaucracy and the dam companies.’
POSITIVE STEP
A major step in the right direction appears to have been taken with the publication in 2011 of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol, supported by NGOs such as WWF and the Nature Conservancy, governments, banks, developers and operators, and co-ordinated by the International Hydropower Association (IHA). ‘When there is any change in land use, there will be impacts,’ says Richard Taylor, executive director of the IHA. ‘It’s essential to involve the potentially affected communities in the process of investigating these impacts. Where resettlement is unavoidable, community-led decision making on plans made in partnership with the developer is likely to be the most successful in implementation.’
While the protocol has no mandatory powers, Meng believes that its 23 guidelines, on issues such as displacement and economic and environmental impacts, still have teeth, and will raise standards through the incentives involved. ‘It offers clear guidelines and best practice but, crucially, it’s a valuable tool for banks – it tells them what to look out for when they’re deciding where to put their investment. It’s effectively a risk-assessment tool.’
The World Bank, which has observer status for the protocol, believes that it’s the option that works best in the real world. ‘Because it isn’t binding, you’re increasing the chances that people will participate, and that over time it, will become a badge of honour that people will want to be associated with,’ says Julia Bucknall, manager of the World Bank’s central water unit.
‘The thinking about sediment management, and the environmental and social aspects, has improved dramatically in the past ten years,’ she adds. ‘The debate has moved on, from simply giving people cash, or saying “Here’s a field, we’ll irrigate it for you.” It’s about giving people a real choice, with roads and healthpoints.
‘We’ve learnt how to work with local communities so that those who are displaced have real, enhanced livelihood options,’ she continues. ‘We have to look at household dynamics so that we don’t empower one part of the family at the expense of another – by giving cash to the male head of the house, who may invest the money in a way that doesn’t benefit the rest of the family.’
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Norwegian engineering company Statkraft, a signatory to the protocol, believes that this approach and the adoption of sustainability principles laid down by the International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, has helped to minimise the impact of dams in Laos. A major challenge, says Dr Stephen Sparkes, vice president for corporate responsibility at Stakraft, is persuading company bosses that the investment is worth it. ‘If something makes commercial sense as well as environmental sense, then it’s easier to sell,’ he says. ‘But if it isn’t financially profitable, then it may not be satisfactory for some hydropower investors. If you’re interested in social and environmental responsibility, it doesn’t come free.’
Overall, Sparkes reckons that the social and environmental overheads on a conventional dam project are between two and five per cent, but investing to meet meaningful sustainability standards raises overheads to between five and ten per cent. ‘It’s difficult to demonstrate whether investing two per cent more in social responsibility gives you a two per cent higher chance of getting the next job,’ he says. ‘But it gives you a smoother ride than a company that just goes in and is only concerned about making money. A spreadsheet will show you the cost of employing another six people to deal with social responsibility issues, but it won’t show the money you’ve wasted and lost in meetings and additional work because you failed to spend an extra US$1million on social responsibility.’
However, International Rivers has decided to stay outside the protocol. ‘It’s effectively greenwashing,’ says Imhof. ‘The protocol doesn’t have the support of local communities, and it’s more of a scorecard than a set of standards. You can get a low mark in one area, a high one in another, and still be considered sustainable.’
Taylor acknowledges that there is room for improvement and feels that the industry – and the wider media – should encourage progress by highlighting dams that are built responsibly. ‘In the selection processes for tendering, financing and permitting, there needs to be a distinct advantage given to entities that have a good track record in corporate social responsibility and sustainability performance,’ he says.
CHINESE REVOLUTION
Yet concern among environmentalists over standards remains widespread, in large part, they argue, because most dams are underwritten by states or private companies. The World Bank, once a large financer of dams, now funds just two to five per cent of large dams. ‘We believe that the best way for us is to fund examples of how to build dams right or better, and we work with others to share these standards and experience,’ says Bucknall. ‘We suspect that we have more impact this way than if we run around funding many more projects.’
There are no prizes for guessing which country is the driving force behind the flurry of mega dams. Chinese companies and banks are now the biggest builders and financers of global dam construction; according to International Rivers, China is building 312 dams in 72 different countries.
This means that China stands at the heart of the debate about just how well the dam-building industry is governed. In a report published last year, The New Great Walls, International Rivers found both good and bad in China’s dam building. ‘There have been some positive developments,’ the report notes. ‘Sinohydro, a state-owned company and the world’s largest dam builder, has adopted an environmental policy with a view to addressing its international responsibilities… Despite this, many Chinese hydropower companies continue to pursue projects that have significant and devastating impacts for host communities and the environment.’
Other NGOs are less ambivalent. ‘Every second dam is being built either in China or by Chinese companies,’ acknowledges WWF’s Meng. ‘But the days are gone when China looked to fill the market niche for dirty jobs that involved cheap stuff done quickly. We can see that they’re no longer just interested in delivering a project to a basic standard – they’re looking to deliver state-of-the-art projects. They’re in contact with the rest of the world and want to excel.’
The key, according to Dr Jeff Opperman, a freshwater scientist at the Nature Conservancy, is that planning for dams must consider the entire river basin – not just the immediate impacts of a single dam. This way, he argues, ‘a much broader set of solutions becomes available and the possibilities for win–win solutions increases’.
Opperman points to the experience of dam building on the Penobscot River in Maine, USA. Here, a range of interests – the Penobscot Indian Nation, state and federal agencies, and conservation organisations – have worked with a hydropower company to identify solutions for both energy production and ecosystem restoration at the scale of the entire river basin. ‘The resulting plan features the removal of two dams on the main river and the addition of state-of-the-art fish-passage facilities on a third dam,’ says Opperman. These measures would open up nearly 1,600 kilometres of habitat for endangered Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and river herring.
DROUGHT AND FLOODS
Because they play such a huge role in influencing the flow of water, dams find themselves tied up with the debate over how climate change is likely to unfold. Recent research suggests that many dams in Southern Africa are utterly inappropriate for a changing climate and may well exacerbate the impact of such change.
In A Risky Climate for Southern African Hydro, an International Rivers report on the hydrological risks associated with Zambezi River Basin dams, Dr Richard Beilfuss argues that Southern Africa’s largest rivers are ill-prepared to withstand the shocks of a changing climate. The entire Zambezi River Basin, he says, is highly susceptible to extreme droughts (often multi-year droughts) and floods that occur nearly every decade.
The result could be uneconomic dams that under-perform in the face of more extreme drought, and more dangerous dams that haven’t been designed to handle increasingly damaging floods. ‘Climatic uncertainty must be incorporated into dam design, to avoid the hazards of over- or under-designed infrastructure and financial risk,’ Beilfuss writes.
Changing weather patterns may also bring economic problems for the underwriters of dams. ‘Many developers aren’t aware of this yet,’ says Meng. ‘They’ve been taught to look at river- and water-flow patterns from the past 300 years to judge what will happen in the next 200 years – but that no longer applies. There’s no certainty any more.’
And large dams may also be net emitters of greenhouse gases. In the tropics, large reservoirs can become repositories for decaying matter that emits large quantities of methane. ‘Hydropower plants take the water from the bottom of the reservoir, which is where the methane is most concentrated – that is then released when the water turns the turbines,’ says Imhof.
CHANGING ROLES
The World Bank’s view, however, is that dams are still essential. ‘It seems strange when people say that as there may be less water we shouldn’t build dams,’ says Bucknall. ‘Storage will be at a premium, and dams and hydropower will become all the more important. Even if the water level is too low for the turbines to turn, at least there will be a reservoir of water that can be used for something. The role of dams and hydropower in preventing droughts and floods and creating systems for irrigation becomes so much more important.’
Versatility isn’t something that comes to mind when you think of dams, but Bucknall believes that they will have to be productive in different ways. ‘There’s a lot of room to do much better with the dams we have,’ she says. ‘A lot of dams are single purpose – and 90 per cent of them don’t produce hydropower – so there’s room for an expansion of multi-purpose dams. The links between water and energy will become much more explicit and will have to be managed much more carefully. Water security will be a huge political and social issue as climate change, a growing population and economic growth come together.’
Meng is also optimistic that dams will have more positive than negative impacts. ‘The performance of dam building will improve because the knowledge is there now,’ he says. ‘There’s a recognition of the rights of indigenous people. Nobody can now say, “We didn’t know, the science wasn’t there.”
‘There will be black-sheep cases and governance issues, where corruption means that things don’t play out in the way a logical person would expect,’ he continues. ‘We just need the political and economic will and power.’
Others see the emergence of China, Brazil and other nations as posing new, worrying, threats. ‘We’re in a much more challenging environment than we were 10–15 years ago,’ says Imhof. ‘The rise of China, Brazil and Thailand is changing the scene – these are countries that have a lot of money to throw around for major projects. But I’m an optimist – a lot of dams being built aren’t as bad as those of the past. But given the threats of climate change, we can’t afford to dam and divert the world’s rivers.’
BOX: THREE GORGES' LEGACY
The Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River – completed last year – is reckoned to be the most gargantuan engineering project in human history. For many environmentalists it’s also the most notorious.
The dam, which took 18 years to build, holds a clutch of dubious records, including the most people displaced by a dam (more than 1.2 million) and the most settlements flooded (13 cities, 140 towns, 1,350 villages; along with hundreds of factories, mines and waste dumps). This legacy, along with the influence of big industrial centres upstream, is creating, according to International Rivers, ‘a festering bog of effluent, silt, industrial pollutants and rubbish’.
Were that not enough, it seems that the dam’s 600-kilometre-long reservoir has been responsible for landslips, wider ground movements and tremors. According to China Daily, 243 dangerous geological events have occurred in the reservoir area, and 9,324 sites are potentially threatened by such hazards.
A recent report posted on China Dialogue, an independent environmental website, said the dam had changed the climate around the reservoir and downstream. The dam, it argued, has created a low-pressure zone that affects normal atmospheric flows, triggering extreme weather events, such as the 2006 and 2010 droughts, and even the 2008 blizzards. In 2011, the Chinese government made a rare public concession, noting that the dam had ‘caused some urgent problems in terms of environmental protection, the prevention of geological hazards and the welfare of the relocated communities’.
Even so, the Three Gorges is but one piece of the jigsaw. The Yangtze watershed alone – including four of its tributaries – has 103 dams either built, being constructed or in the pipeline. Across China, the government has announced new hydropower projects amounting to 140 gigawatts – equivalent to the output of six Three Gorges dams.
BOX: WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?
The immediate response to those who challenge the need for building so many large dams is obvious: how else do you meet what is an unarguable demand for energy? ‘We would never promote the idea that no dams should ever be built,’ says Aviva Imhof of International Rivers. ‘That would be ludicrous. In a carbon-constrained world, hydropower could play a part in energy production.’
However, starting from a basic principle of energy reduction would help. According to International Rivers, reasonably applied energy-efficiency measures in Brazil would save five times as much energy as would be produced by the Belo Monte dam. ‘The problem for a lot of countries,’ says Imhof, ‘is that you have an enormous bureaucracy that has built up to produce and approve dams. So what do they do? You build more dams.’
Alternatives depend on regions and local conditions. With 90 per cent of its electricity coming from hydropower, Kenya has been over-reliant on dams, as it has found to its cost in recent years of drought. Now the country is pursuing wind power ahead of new dams, with a 310-megawatt wind farm due to begin generation this year. Kenya is also keen to exploit its abundant resources of geothermal energy, which the government says has the potential to produce 7,000 megawatts.
February 2013
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