An urgent overhaul of Three Gorges’ Dam management policy to enforce relevant regulations is needed to save various endangered species, improve the environment, and encourage economic development, say the authors of this paper. Xiankun Yang and X X Lu of the National University of Singapore discuss what we’ve learned from this controversial megadam over the past decade.
(June 4, 2014) On the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown today, we recommend a visit to the Twitter page of Patrick Chovanec and the tremendous photographs he has posted commemorating the events of June 4, 1989. Patrick is an adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a former business professor at Tsinghua
(May 27, 2014) Another excellent entry in a growing number of critiques examining China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project and the controversial geo-engineering giant’s large-scale problems.
(April 25, 2014) Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake, has held water for at least five million years and is also known as the cradle of mankind for its abundance of hominid fossils, but may now suffer the same dry fate as the Aral Sea in central Asia thanks to hydro-electric development that ties neighbours Ethiopia and Kenya together. Writer Ben Rawlence looks here at how regional power plays can work against accountability and how the complexity of large projects and the many actors involved with them militates against holding anyone to account.
(April 24, 2014) Chinadialogue’s Beijing editor Liu Jianqiang reviews China’s newly revised environmental protection law which comes into effect in 2015 and represents the first time the law has been revised in 25 years. The new law provides authorities with the tools to dole out harsher punishments and sanctions to polluters, including more heat for officials found to be falsifying data and ducking environmental impact assessments. Under the new law, individual citizens still will not be able to initiate public interest lawsuits and although NGOs will be able to pursue litigation, the number permitted to do so has been capped, most likely in order to prevent a flood of environmental lawsuits in local courts and local authorities from being sued too frequently — which raises the question: what is the point of the law? In any case, says Mr. Liu, China’s environmental problems cannot be blamed solely on the lack of a powerful law but are more “the consequence of weak implementation and failure to hold officials accountable for rampant pollution and ecological destruction. … What good is perfect legislation if our authorities fail to implement it? China’s new law cannot answer this question.”
(April 11, 2014) Experts say an aging mega-dam on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe is in imminent danger of collapse and poses a threat to 3.5 million people. Zimbabwe’s disaster preparedness was revealed as “extremely weak” earlier this year after torrential rains caused the partial collapse of the country’s Tokwe-Mukosi dam, which displaced thousands and forced the government to declare it a national disaster.
(April 9, 2014) U.S. economist and columnist Irwin Stelzer draws on the doctrine of odious debts for his most recent opinion piece to suggest Ukrainian citizens repudiate public debt incurred by former regimes that instead of benefiting the people went to fund the “fancies” of the country’s “now-deposed gang of public- and private-sector cronies”.
(April 7, 2014) Chinese geologist and environmentalist Fan Xiao says the recent quakes that struck central China’s Hubei Province in Zigui county — “the first county of the Three Gorges Dam” due to its proximity to the project site — signal that the seismic threat posed by Three Gorges Dam is at its most critical stage now. Reservoir-induced seismicity (RIS) is most likely to occur within a few years, even a decade after initial filling of a dam reservoir to its highest level, due to the time it takes for reservoir water to penetrate deep into seismic faults and fissures before it triggers seismic activity. A 2010 study revealed seismic monitors around the Three Gorges Dam reservoir and in Hubei Province registered 3,429 earthquakes between June of 2003 (when inundation of the reservoir began) and December 31, 2009: a 30-fold increase in seismic frequency over the pre-dam period.
(April 5, 2014) A letter to the editor expresses concern at the lack of response from Belize authorities to environmental lawyer Candy Gonzalez’ public campaign for government bodies to implement a risk management program for the controversial Canadian-owned Chalillo dam on Belize’s Macal River. In particular, the monitoring and testing of mercury levels in fish caught in the Macal and E. coli levels in the river’s water. Writes concerned villager, John Tut: “It seems that the Government of Belize has once again abandoned the well-being and livelihood of the Cayo people in favour of the monstrous multinational company – BECOL [the non-regulated hydroelectric generation business that operates the Chalillo dam, a subsidiary of dam owner, Canadian company, Fortis, Inc.].”
(April 1, 2014) Li Wufeng, the high-level Chinese minister who died after falling from the 6th floor of his office last month, once briefly served as the assistant general manager of China Three Gorges Project Corporation (CTGPC), the recent target of a two-month corruption probe that angered the Chinese public with its revelations of bidding irregularities, bribery and excessive spending by corporation officials. Li’s sudden death has caused much speculation. A CTGPC insider is quoted in this report as saying meddling by CTGPC leaders and their families in bidding for company projects and interest transfers was an “open secret” and that “even individual retired cadres were involved in the countless corruptions. Now everyone at the CTGPC is in a panic, because everyone was involved.”
(March 28, 2014) Once again, an earthquake has hit the Three Gorges reservoir area and dam officials are reassuring the public that the world’s largest hydropower plant is operating normally. The epicenter of a 4.3-magnitude earthquake struck Zigui County, just 30 km from the Three Gorges Dam at 12:20 a.m. March 27, 2014. Stay tuned while Probe International investigates the cause and effect of this latest tremor.
(March 17, 2014) Reporter Lily Kuo takes an in-depth look at China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project — the world’s largest water diversion conceived originally by Mao Zedong as a way to relieve North China’s dwindling water resources by “borrowing” from the south of the country. But not even the project’s leaders are pretending the mammoth, ultra-complex, $80-billion scheme will solve China’s water problem. Moreover, it has already created extra problems. Kuo concludes the project is another example of an engineer-dominated government’s fondness for huge-scale vanity projects with a particular weakness for mega-water works. No wonder. Without the man-made institutions — a robust regulatory regime and the rule of law — the Chinese government is bereft of tools to induce the efficient use (and conservation) of water. And so it builds canals and moves water from one watershed to another, creating havoc and perpetuating the problem of China’s crippling water crisis.
(March 17, 2014) Part two of Lily Kuo’s substantial overview of China’s South-to-North Water Diversion project (SNWDP) and its resettlement process. Kuo notes that since 1949, more than 45 million Chinese have been displaced by infrastructure projects and, of those, 12 million have been moved for water schemes. The water projects, she notes, have a particularly depressing record in terms of outcomes for the resettled. Although there are signs, she says, of villagers moved for the SNWDP receiving better care than those in the past, the same old resettlement problems abound. Worst of all, there are no farms to tend and jobs to do. “This isn’t a life,” says one migrant of the soul-destroying joblessness. “In the morning, you see everyone sleeps in. In the afternoon, they play cards. That’s it.”
(February 18, 2014) As Catalonia’s secession movement gains new momentum, Albert Pont, the leader of a Catalan pro-independence business lobby, recently called out part of the national debt owed by the government of Spain — estimated at 962 billion euros in 2013, its highest level in a century — as “odious debt.” In the event of separation from Spain, Pont said that while an independent Catalonia — currently a province widely known as “the factory of Spain” and as the country’s wealthiest region — would be willing to “assume part of [the Spanish] debt; obviously, a proportionate one…. there are shares of the debt that we are not responsible for.”
(February 14, 2014) German-based hydrology expert Wang Weiluo says Beijing’s water scarcity is a manmade disaster that began following the Chinese Communist Party takeover in 1949.
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