The Mekong Cascade Hydropower Project
The Mekong River, known as the Lancang in China, is the heart and soul of mainland Southeast Asia. Over 60 million people depend on the river and its tributaries for food, water, transport and many other aspects of their daily lives. The river supports one of the world’s most productive inland fishery and arguably the second most diverse plant and animal diversity after the Amazon basin.
China’s construction of dams along the upper reaches of the Mekong threatens this complex ecosystem. Development of an 8-dam cascade is already well underway, with two dams completed and three currently under construction. The scheme will drastically change the river’s natural flood-drought cycle and block the transport of sediment, affecting downstream ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions living downstream in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Impacts to water levels and fisheries have already been recorded along the Thai-Lao border.
With the Mekong fisheries harvest currently estimated to be worth over 2 billion dollars per annum in a region where around 30% of the population earns less than $2 per day, any significant fisheries decline caused by the dams will impact heavily on the lives of millions. Fish is also the primary source of animal protein for many of the regions most impoverished subsistence peoples who do not possess alternative survival resources to replace those that are compromised by the dams.
Despite this, construction has proceeded without consultation with China’s downstream neighbors and without an assessment of the dams’ likely impacts on the river and its people. What’s more, there are likely to be more dams built even farther upstream, near the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage Site. A Xinhua media outlet reported in July 2004 that pre-feasibility studies have begun for a 7-dam cascade proposed farther upstream.
Within China, communities resettled by the Manwan and Dachaoshan dams have suffered from lack of adequate compensation, problems with food security and increased incidence of disease. While steps have been taken to fix these problems, much more must be done to ensure that people’s livelihoods are restored. For the millions of Mekong peoples down stream of the dams there have been no compensation or grass roots mitigation measures put in place at all to protect them from the impacts of the dams. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, Chinas dam builders maintain that the Mekong Cascade will have ‘negligible’ negative impacts down stream of the dams.
The government-run China Development Bank is expected to provide the majority of funding for the Upper Mekong dams. The leading developer is Yunnan Huaneng Lancangjiang Hydropower Company Ltd, a subsidiary of one of China’s largest independent power producers, Huaneng Power International.
