Page 2 of
2 Asia's river systems face
collapse By Alan Boyd
practices and the destruction of
mangroves are putting the Mekong at risk.
Governments are waking up to the threat to
their river systems, but there are inevitable
economic and political trade-offs. India's
localized Ganga Action Plan for the Ganges, which
is building a chain of waste-treatment plants, has
had little backing from the leading political
parties because of the perceived threat to
industry, and it barely
registers with religious authorities.
Chinese officials have promised their
neighbors on the Mekong that Beijing will "fully
consider" the environmental consequences of
tapping water from the river, which is known in
China as the Lancang. Yet China refuses to join
monitoring efforts by the Mekong River Commission.
The WWF and other environment agencies
have acknowledged that policymakers face a
difficult choice between development goals and
ecosystems as they battle to raise living
standards. Under the Millennium Accord brokered by
the United Nations in 2000, the countries of the
world agreed to halve the proportion of those
without access to affordable and safe drinking
water and basic sanitation by 2015.
Poor
countries pledged to govern with greater
effectiveness and to invest their resources more
wisely. Rich countries committed to support them
through increased aid and debt relief, among other
things.
Much of this aid has been
channeled into big-money water-infrastructure
projects with the backing of the World Bank, the
Asian Development Bank and other lending
institutions, usually with multinational
conglomerates from the richer nations as project
partners.
Small countries such as Laos and
Myanmar stand to make a financial windfall. For
Laos, one of the most backward countries in Asia,
the planned investment of more than US$1 billion
in the contentious Nam Theun II Dam will be
equivalent to three times its national budget.
But the WWF report contends that the
benefits are often overstated, as most returns go
to the offshore partners, while local communities
face dislocation and the potential loss of
livelihoods.
"Dams are both a blessing and
a curse - the benefits they provide often come at
high environmental and social costs," said Dr Ute
Collier, head of the WWF's Dams Initiative. "Those
most affected by dams rarely benefit from them or
gain access to power and clean water."
According to studies by the WCD and the
UN, the dams contribute water to only 12-16% of
world food production, even though half were built
specifically for the irrigation of crops and an
estimated 30-40% of the 271 million hectares of
irrigated land worldwide relies on dams.
This is because irrigation is notoriously
inefficient: on average, it utilizes only 38% of
water discharges and up to 1,500 trillion liters
of water is wasted annually, enough to supply the
whole of the African continent.
Likewise,
there are arguments against the capital investment
needed for the 19% of dam capacity that is used to
supply power to electricity grids, even though it
offers relatively low greenhouse emissions.
UN studies have found that every megawatt
of installed capacity for hydropower costs about
$1 million, while the bulk of output is often
exported for hard currency rather than being
offered to local populations.
Nevertheless, the WWF concedes that "there
is little doubt that dams have improved
agricultural output by making more land suitable
for cropping through irrigation", while also
piping drinking water and providing valuable
benefits for flood mitigation. The central
argument, the agency says, is how to build dams in
a less intrusive manner that will sustain water
systems and their habitats. So far the message is
getting through only in developed countries: the
United States is actually dismantling some of its
dams.
But as water resources dwindle, it
is likely that the potential for conflict between
neighbors who share rivers will force a change of
attitude, as the impact of dams and other flow
diversions is selective. Communities living
downstream from large dams, particularly those
that rely on natural floodplains for agricultural,
herding and fishery production, suffer the most
when structures are built upriver.
China's
activities on the upper Mekong are disrupting the
navigation of Laotian fishing vessels, disrupting
flood patterns for Thai river communities, drying
up Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia and aggravating
salination problems in Vietnam's delta region.
Management of the glacier belt in the
Himalayas affects a whole range of river systems,
providing 40% of the water in the Ganges and much
of the flow for the Indus, Brahmaputra and Padma
and feeding the Red Sea. Pakistan, India and
Bangladesh put their trust in Nepal and Tibet.
Internal diversions of water have a
similar impact on domestic populations. China
plans to pipe water from the Yangtze basin to the
Yellow, Huaihe and Haihe river systems more than
1,000km to the north to revive the Yellow River,
which is now only a trickle in places.
India is considering 30 separate projects
that will link rivers, including the Mahanadi,
Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery, as a way of
transferring flows, mostly from the north and west
to the south.
Le Quesne said attitudes of
governments will have to change if the world's
river systems are to be saved.
"We've all
been used to taking water for granted. We've
assumed that water is a limitless resource. It's
not anymore," he said.
"It's a question of
using water wisely and managing it. It's a
question of political will."
Alan
Boyd, now based in Sydney, has reported on
Asia for more than two decades.
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