(July 11, 2006) ‘If all the projects go ahead, the Salween will become one of the world’s most heavily dammed river systems, with all the dislocation to people and wildlife that entails.’

(July 11, 2006) The Asian Development Bank loan is to be spent on upgrading wastewater treatment facilities, expanding collection networks and building larger stormwater pumping stations for the city of Wuhan.

(July 10, 2006) A Burmese government official says construction on the Hutgyi dam on the Salween (Nu) River will start in December 2006 or January 2007, ahead of the November 2007 date in the initial agreement with Thailand and China.

(July 6, 2006) The operation and regulation of China’s new dam builders as commercial power generating companies will set the pace for how rivers will be regulated in the six-country Mekong region for years to come. The following paper was delivered by Grainne Ryder of Probe International to the Mekong Region Waters Dialogue, which took place in Vientiane, Lao PDR, on July 6-7.

(June 22, 2006) The Asian Development Bank reports that the ADB-financed company responsible for linking hydro dams in Yunnan to the provincial power grid has been operating at a loss in recent years and is not financially viable.

(June 9, 2006) Four dams are being built on Burma’s Salween [Nu] River, ostensibly in the name of regional development. But campaigners say the dams, which will flood areas the Karen minority hope one day to make their independent homeland, amount to an act of war.

(June 1, 2006) [View Pdf]

(May 16, 2006) Well-intentioned or not, government policies that have forced villagers to relocate to make way for development projects "have mostly been disastrous for people and communities," says a new study by Probe International.

(May 12, 2006) Finding the True Cost of China ‘s West-East Hydro.

(May 10, 2006) Centralized planning has delivered a series of large, centralized hydro electric energy projects to China, many of which have proved to be a serious mismatch to the power problems they were meant to solve. Here, Grainne Ryder argues that consumer-oriented markets ought to guide investment decisions in the future, and that these would aid decentralized energy projects.