Elephant logos adorning the stationery and pamphlets of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) at its meeting in Bangkok are serving as a bitter reminder of the brewing controversy over the body’s links to the Nam Theun 2 dam project in Laos, which
critics say will kill hundreds of wild elephants.

Environmental activists from six Mekong River riparian countries attending a separate conference on Natural Resources Management in the Mekong Region at the United Nations office in Bangkok this week attacked the IUCN for “striking an illegitimate bargain with those who would destroy [primary Laotian forests]”.

For the past decade, IUCN and one of its members, the Wildlife Conservation Society, have been working with the Laotian government to manage the 3,200-square-kilometre Nakai-Nam Theun National Biodiversity Conservation Area.

Both expressed their support for Laos’ plan to build the dam to generate revenue that could help conserve the remaining forests. The Laotian government has been pursuing a loan guarantee and other concessions from the World Bank for the US$1.3-billion (Bt52.2-billion) project. The bank is expected to make a decision in the next few months. “The World Bank is using information from the IUCN all the time to justify this dam, and we expect the IUCN as a leading world conservation organisation to defend, not destroy, Laos’ world-class forest,” said Weerawat Thiraprasart, adviser to the Bangkok-based Project for Ecological Recovery.

The Laotian government is scheduled to discuss a conservation plan for its ecologically unique Nakai-Nam Theun forests today at the World Conservation Congress hosted by the IUCN. The plan to build a dam and donate revenue to the environment has drawn controversy in past decades, as the proposed dam would flood 450 square kilometres in the heart of the conservation area. In addition to the nearly 400 Asian elephants at risk, the project would affect a number species on the IUCN’s endangered “Red List”, including the rare white-winged wood duck.

In its 1997 letter to the US-based International Rivers Network, the IUCN stated that, “On balance the social and environmental benefits of the [dam] proposal outweigh the negative aspects.”

It continued, “The globally important biodiversity hotspot which is the Nam Theun watershed will be more surely protected if the dam is built in association with the [World Bank] than by an unregulated, unmonitored private-sector consortium.”

When asked last week for an update on its role in the project, IUCN spokeswoman Denise Jeanmonod told The Nation that the “IUCN secretariat does not take a position ‘for’ or ‘against’ the plan to build the Nam Theun 2 dam”.

But the body’s failure to oppose the dam drew criticism from a Laotian environmentalist. The activist, who asked not to be named, said that by not opposing the destruction of this ecologically critical forest, the IUCN risked becoming irrelevant.

“If the IUCN just wants to put out a list of endangered species, but not do anything to protect them, it should change its name to an endangered-species listing organisation,” he said. “It should no longer call itself a conservation organisation.”

Critics also point out that the dam proposal violates six out of seven recommendations made by the 2000 World Commission on Dams (WCD) report, commissioned by the IUCN and the World Bank to guide the evaluation of future proposals regarding large dams.

“Nam Theun 2 clearly does not comply with the strategic priorities of the WCD,” said Shannon Lawrence, international policy analyst of the Washington DC-based group Environmental Defence, which is a member of the IUCN.

The Nation