When Rivers Cease to Flow
covering burma and southeast asia
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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COVER STORY

When Rivers Cease to Flow


By RUDY THOMAS APRIL, 2010 - VOLUME 18 NO.4


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Concerns about climate change have emboldened the dam industry, which argues that dams are a “green” technology because they produce energy without burning fossil fuel. But the California-based NGO International Rivers Network (IRN) explains the darker side of the relationship. Climate change is predicted to make weather conditions increasingly severe, it says. “Some areas will become much drier, some wetter. More extreme floods will threaten the safety of dams, and unprecedented droughts will drastically reduce the hydropower and water supply services that dams are built to provide. Minimizing the impacts of climate change will require diversifying away from dependence on big dams for electricity generation and flood control.”

A related issue in the Himalayan area, of which Kachin State is a part, is the melting of glaciers. In Asia, throughout the long dry season that follows the monsoon, rivers are sustained by the gradual melting of ice in glaciers. With new evidence of quicker melting of Himalayan snow, there is no guarantee that the dams will be able to fill as expected, or to generate the electricity that justifies the expense.

Hard questions?

Rather than improving dam-building standards to accommodate the increased uncertainty, there is evidence that many dam builders are actually downgrading standards. When Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok conducted an environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the Hatgyi dam planned for the lower Salween River in Karen State, the EIA reported that the Chinese, Thai and Burmese consortium recently decided to lower the “flood criteria” from an earlier plan designed by the Japanese.

In other words, despite grave concerns about the viability of Burma’s dams, some dam builders are downgrading their standards.

Recognizing the growing civic movement against mega-dam projects, in 1998 the World Bank funded the World Commission on Dams (WCD). In its final report in 2000, the WCD unveiled a framework of recommendations and guidelines that forced a global rethink on damming rivers.

“While dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development,” the report concluded, “[in] too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure the benefits, especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment.”  

According to Peter Bosshard, the policy director of IRN: “The Burmese government’s authoritarian and unaccountable approach to dam building is the antithesis of the participatory framework of the World Commission on Dams.”  

Rudy Thomas is a Chiang Mai-based journalist who specializes in Southeast Asian environmental issues.

The world’s worst dam disaster occurred in China in 1975 when a dam gave way during a cyclone. The collapse of the Banqiao dam and the smaller upstream Shimantan dam resulted in a total of 60 other downstream dams breaking, and the deaths of some 245,000 people. The disaster was kept secret for more than 20 years.



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