October 2014


www.hamptonroadsmessenger.com


Large Dams 'Highly Correlated' with Poor Water Quality


The Hampton Roads Messenger 5


“The evidence we’ve compiled of planetary-scale impacts from river change is strong enough to warrant a major international


focus on


understanding the thresholds for river change in the world’s major basins, and for the planet as a whole system,” Jason Rainey, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.


Economic burden Particularly


energy-starved countries,


concerns


for increasingly developing around


large-scale dam-building go beyond environmental


considerations. Energy access remains a


central


Fishermen's boats on the Mekong River in northern Laos. There are already 30 existing dams along the river, and an additional 134 hydropower projects are planned for the lower Mekong. Credit: Irwin Loy/IPS


BY CAREY L. BIRON


dams are likely having a detrimental impact


WASHINGTON - Large-scale on water


biodiversity around


quality the


and world,


according to a new study that tracks and correlates data from thousands of projects.


Focusing on the 50 most substantial river basins, researchers with International Rivers, a watchdog group, compiled


and compared


available data from some 6,000 of the world’s estimated 50,000 large dams. Eighty percent of the time, they found, the presence of large dams, typically those over 15 metres high, came along with findings of poor water quality, including high levels of mercury and trapped sedimentation.


careful to note that the correlations do not necessarily indicate


While the investigators are causal


relationships, the say the data suggest a clear, global pattern. They are now calling for an intergovernmental panel of experts tasked with coming up with a systemic method by which to assess and monitor the health of the world’s river basins.


“[R]iver fragmentation due to


decades of dam-building is highly correlated with poor water quality and low biodiversity,”


International


Rivers said Tuesday in unveiling the State of the World’s Rivers, an online database detailing the findings. “Many of the world’s great river basins have been dammed to the point of serious decline.”


The group points to the Tigris-


Euphrates basin, today home to 39 dams and one of the systems that has been most “fragmented” as a result. The effect appears to have been a vast decrease in the region’s traditional marshes, including the salt-tolerant flora that helped sustain the coastal areas, as well as a drop in soil fertility.


The State of the World project tracks the spread of dam-building alongside


water-quality


data on biodiversity and metrics


in the river


basins affected. While the project is using only previously published data, organizers say the effort is the first time that these disparate data sets have been overlaid in order to find broader trends.


“By and large most governments,


particularly in the developing world, do not have the capacity to track this type of data, so in that sense they’re flying blind in setting policy around dam construction,” Zachary Hurwitz, the project’s coordinator, told IPS.


“We can do a much better job at


observing [dam-affected] resettled populations, but most governments don’t have continuous


biodiversity


the capacity to do monitoring.


Yet from our perspective, those data are what you really need in order to have a conversation around energy planning.”


Dam-building boom Today, four of the five most


fragmented river systems are in South and East Asia, according to the new data. But four others in the top 10 are in Europe and North America, home to some of the most extensive dam systems, especially the United States.


circles


For all the debate in development in recent


years about


dam-building in developing countries, the new data suggests that two of the world’s poorest continents, Africa and South America, remain relatively less affected by large-scale damming than other parts of the world.


Of course, both Africa and South


America have enormous hydropower potential and increasingly problematic power crunches, and many of countries in these continents


the are


moving quickly to capitalise on their river energy.


According to estimates from


International Rivers, Brazil alone is currently planning to build more than 650 dams of all sizes. The country is also home to some of the highest numbers of


species that would be threatened by such moves.


Not only are Brazil, China and India busy building dams at home, but companies from these countries are also increasingly selling such services to other developing countries.


“Precisely those basins that are


least fragmented are currently being targeted for a great expansion of dam-building,” Hurwitz says. “But if we look at the experience and data from areas of high historical dam-building – the Mississippi basin the United States, the Danube basin in Europe – those worrying trends are likely to be repeated in the least-frag- mented basins if this proliferation of dam-building continues.”


Advocates particularly are expressing concern over the


confluence of the new strengthened focus on dam-building and the potential impact of climate change on freshwater biodiversity. International Rivers is calling for an intergov- ernmental panel to assess the state of the world’s river basins, aimed at developing metrics for systemic assessment and best practices for river preservation.


Climate Change FROM PAGE 3


short of delivering what we need to truly tackle climate change in a just way. Their flimsy non-binding pledges in New York will do little to improve their track record. What we urgently need are equitable and binding carbon reductions, not flimsy voluntary ones,” she said in a statement.


Friends of the Earth will join with thousands of protesters on Sep. 21 to march in New York, Paris, London and several other cities around the world to “demand climate justice, standing with climate and dirty energy-affected communities worldwide”, the group said.


demonstrations


Some of the cities where the will occur have


already taken steps to reduce emissions and improve the quality of life for residents, as Bloomberg pointed out in Paris. But political awareness needs to be heightened so that special interest groups are not


the ones imposing


directions, the former mayor said. Over three


consecutive terms


as mayor of New York, where he reportedly spent 268 million dollars of his own money on election campaigns, Bloomberg set up schemes to make New


York “greener”, including


recycling food waste and aiming at converting organic waste to biogas.


For Bloomberg and Gurría, cities


are a” crucial part of efforts to slow climate change” because urban areas produce more than two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions. The share of the global population living in cities is also set to increase to 70 percent, or 6.4 billion people, by 2050 from the current roughly 50 percent, says the OECD.


“Cities have the potential to


make a great difference in the global effort to confront climate change: they account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and two-thirds of the world’s energy use today,” according to Bloomberg and Gurría.


Both men called on world leaders


gathering at the UN Climate Summit to “look for ways to help their cities accelerate their progress and empower them to do even more.”


“We are all aware of the immense


scale of the global challenge presented by climate change,” Gurría said. “It is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is an economic and a social issue. It is vital to our quality of life and to the life of our fragile earth. Action is becoming ever-more urgent.”


The OECD and Bloomberg


Philanthropies also issued a “Policy Perspectives” document Wednesday that


recommends measures for


enabling cities to fight global warming. The recommendations include actively involving the private sector because “green” policies cannot be separated from economic growth, according to Gurría.


He said that various sectors


needed to work together to “enable real progress in reaching international climate


goals and a meaningful,


global agreement next year in Paris,” where the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference will take place.


other NGOs remain however, of the commitment


Friends of the Earth and many unconvinced, by


wealthy nations such as those that are members of the OECD. The group said that the positions of developed countries’


leaders “are increasingly


driven by the narrow economic and financial interests of wealthy elites, the fossil fuel industry and multinational corporations.”


Inter Press Service consideration development in any set of metrics, and lack of


energy is an inherent drag on issues as disparate as education and industry. Further, concerns around climate change have re-energized what had been flagging interest in large dam projects, epitomized by last year’s decision by the World Bank to refocus on such projects.


around whether this is the best way to go, particularly


Yet there remains fervent debate for developing


countries. Large dams typically cost several billion dollars and require extensive planning to complete, and in the past these plans have been blamed for overwhelming fragile economies.


A new touchstone in this debate


came out earlier this year, in a widely cited study from researchers at Oxford University.


Looking at nearly 250 or even social


large dams dating back as far as the 1920s, they found pervasive cost and time overruns.


“We find overwhelming evidence


that budgets are systematically biased below actual costs of large hydropower dams,” the authors wrote in the paper’s abstract.


“The outside view suggests that in most countries large hydropower dams will be too costly … and take too long to build to deliver a positive risk-adjusted


return unless suitable


risk management measures … can be affordably provided.”


encouraged


Instead, the researchers policymakers


in


developing countries to focus on “agile energy alternatives” that can be built more quickly.


On the other side of this debate,


the findings were attacked by the International Commission on Large Dams, a


Paris-based NGO, for


focusing on an unrepresentative set of extremely large dams. The group’s president, Adama Nombre, also questioned the climate impact of the researchers’ preferred alternative options.


“What


alternatives?” “Fossil


fuel


would be those Nombre


asked. plants consuming coal


or gas. Without explicitly saying it, the authors use a purely financial reasoning to bring us toward a carbon- emitting electric system.”


Inter Press Service


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