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Dams in China Turn the Mekong Into a River of Discord
Rivers know no borders, but dams do
Michael Richardson
YaleGlobal, 16 July 2009
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=12580
SINGAPORE: Back in 1986, when China began building the first of a
series of dams on the Mekong River, hardly anyone in the downstream
countries of Southeast Asia paid attention. But today, as China races
to finish the fourth dam for generating electricity on the upper
reaches of Southeast Asia’s biggest river, concerns about possible
environmental impacts in the region are rising fast. Moreover, fear
about antagonizing China and Southeast Asia’s internecine dispute
might make any concerted move unlikely.
The sheer scale of China’s engineering to harness the power of the
Mekong and change its natural flow is setting off alarm bells,
especially in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, the four countries
of the lower Mekong basin where more than 60 million people depend on
the river for food, water and transportation.
A report in May by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and
the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) warned that China’s plan for a
cascade of eight dams on the Mekong, which it calls the Lancang Jiang,
might pose “a considerable threat” to the river and its natural
riches. In June, Thailand’s prime minister was handed a petition
calling for a halt to dam building. It was signed by over 11,000
people, many of them subsistence farmers and fishermen who live along
the river’s mainstream and its many tributaries.
Some analysts say that if the worst fears of critics are realized,
relations between China and its neighbors in mainland Southeast Asia
will be severely damaged. But mindful of the growing power and
influence of China, Southeast Asian governments have muffled their
concern. Meanwhile, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand have put forward plans
to dam their sections of the Mekong mainstream, prompting Vietnam to
object and undermining the local environmentalists’ case against
China.
Although the Mekong is widely regarded as a Southeast Asian river, its
source is in the glaciers high in Tibet. Nearly half of the 4,880
kilometer river flows through China’s Yunnan province before it
reaches Southeast Asia. Since there is no international treaty
governing use of trans-boundary rivers, China is in a dominant
position, controlling the Mekong’s headwater. It has the right to
develop its section of the river as it sees fit, and has done so
without consulting its neighbors, let alone seeking their approval.
The Mekong River basin drains water from an area of 795,000 square
kilometers. The Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-governmental
agency formed in 1995 by the four lower basin countries estimates that
the sustainable hydropower potential of the lower basin alone is a
massive 30,000 megawatts. But it also says that there are major
challenges in balancing the benefits of clean electricity, water
storage and flood control from the dams against negative impacts.
These include population displacement, obstruction to fish movements
up and down the river, and changes in water and sediment flow.
The cascade of dams being constructed in Yunnan will generate over
15,500 megawatts of electricity for cities and industries, helping to
replace polluting fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil. The eight
Yunnan dams will produce about the same amount of electricity as 30
big coal-burning plants.
The fourth of China’s Mekong dams, at Xiaowan, is due to be completed
by 2012 at a cost of nearly US$4 billion. Rising 292 meters, the dam
wall will be the world’s tallest. Its reservoir will hold 15 billion
cubic meters of water, more than five times the combined capacity of
the first three Chinese dams. Since the end of 2008, when the river
diversion channel of the Xiaowan hydropower dam was closed by Chinese
engineers, the reservoir has been filling with water, paving the way
to start the first electricity generating turbine in September. When
full, the reservoir will cover an area of over 190 square kilometers.
With a capacity to generate 4,200 megawatts of electricity, Xiaowan
will be the largest dam so far on the Mekong.
However, by 2014, China plans to finish another dam below the Xiaowan
at Nuozhadu. It will not be quite as high but will impound even more
water, nearly 23 billion cubic meters, and generate 5,000 megawatts of
power.
Chinese officials have assured Southeast Asia that the Yunnan dams
will have a positive environmental impact. They say that by holding
some water back in the wet season, the dams will help control flooding
and river bank erosion downstream. Conversely, releases from the
hydropower reservoirs to generate power in the summer will help ease
water shortages in the lower Mekong during the dry season.
However, the UNEP-AIT report said that Cambodia’s great central lake
Tonle Sap, the nursery of the lower Mekong’s fish stocks, and
Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, its rice bowl, were particularly at risk from
changes to the river’s unique cycle of flood and drought. The
Cambodian lake is linked to the Mekong by the Tonle Sap River.
Scientists are concerned that reductions in the Mekong’s natural
floodwater flow will cause falls in the lake’s water level and fish
stocks, already under pressure from over-harvesting and pollution.
Vietnam worries that dwindling water volumes will aggravate the
problem of sea water intrusion and salination in the low-lying Mekong
Delta, where climate change and sea level rise threaten to inundate
large areas of productive farm land and displace millions of people by
the end of this century.
The MRC says it has been discussing technical cooperation with Chinese
experts to assess downstream river changes caused by hydropower
development. But China has refused to join the MRC or to agree to
observe its resource management guidelines, preferring to remain a
“dialogue partner”. Full membership would intensify scrutiny of its
dam plans by downstream Southeast Asian states and increase pressure
on Beijing, which controls 21 per cent of the water, to take their
interests into account.
While China’s program to dam the Mekong is moving ahead on schedule,
proposals to do the same on the Southeast Asian section of the river
have been put on hold. Before the global credit crisis and economic
slow-down hit Asia’s export-oriented economies with full force this
year, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand had announced plans to follow
China’s lead on the upper Mekong by building a series of dams on the
mainstream of the river in the lower basin. There are now over 3,200
megawatts of electricity being generated on Mekong tributaries in
Laos. But that too is being hurt by the crisis as Thailand, the main
consumer of electricity in the lower Mekong, has announced that
because of the global economic downturn, it expects to cut
substantially the amount of power it imports from Laos.
The slowdown, however, provides a breathing space for Southeast Asian
countries to assess how the Mekong mainstream dam projects will affect
the interests of people in the river basin. But without China’s full
participation, no Mekong management plan can be effective.
Beijing is intent on forging closer economic integration with mainland
Southeast Asia through trade, investment, communication, transport and
energy cooperation with its neighbors in the Greater Mekong Subregion.
But this strategy may backfire if the region concludes that Chinese
dams are having an adverse impact on their future development
prospects.
Michael Richardson is a visiting senior research fellow at the
Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.
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