By Micheal Buckley, New York Times, Op-Ed, 30 March 2015
NEW DELHI — China is the most dammed nation on the planet. With more than 26,000 large dams within its borders, the country has more than the rest of the world combined. The dams feed China’s insatiable demand for energy and can potentially divert water for use in mining, manufacturing and agriculture.
In 2011, when China was already generating more than a fifth of the total hydropower in the world, the leadership announced that it would aim to double the country’s hydropower capacity (to 430 GW) within a decade to reduce its heavy dependency on coal-fired power plants. Since the waterways of mainland China are already packed with dams, this new hydropower output could only come from one place: the rivers of Tibet.
Rivers gushing through deep canyons at the edges of the Tibetan plateau hold the highest hydropower potential in the world. The headwaters of seven major rivers are located in Tibet: They flow into the world’s largest deltas and spread in an arc across Asia — reaching from Pakistan all the way to China.
Two of the continent’s most wild rivers are sourced in Tibet: the Salween and the Brahmaputra. Though they are under threat from retreating glaciers, a more immediate concern is Chinese engineering plans. A cascade of five large dams is planned for both the Salween, which now flows freely, and the Brahmaputra, where one dam is already operational.
Yet all the damming does not benefit Tibetans or other inhabitants: The generated energy is transferred to power-hungry industrial cities farther east. Tibetans are forcibly deprived of their land; protests against hydropower projects are prohibited or violently dispersed.
Even more alarming than the dams are projects to divert the waters of Tibet’s rivers for use in mines, factories and other industries. Diversions of this magnitude have never been attempted in hydroengineering, and the potential environmental consequences could be enormous. At the eastern edge of Tibet, a planned mega diversion from south to north would move water from the Yangtse to the Yellow, two rivers that run across China. Other plans call for diversion of water from the Brahmaputra, Salween and Mekong — all transboundary rivers.
Taking China itself into account, up to two billion people downstream from Tibet depend upon the region’s rivers. Damming and diverting them will have a severe impact on their lives and environment, especially when you consider that the region’s major crops, rice and wheat, require water-intensive cultivation.
Rivers support entire ecosystems of flora and fisheries. Most important, they carry downstream tons of nutrient-rich silt, a cocktail of elements needed for growing plants: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and calcium. Silt is essential for agriculture and for bolstering the deltas against rising sea levels. Dams block silt, and they block fish migration.
The Yangtse River is China’s biggest freshwater fishery, but since the Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2012, the downstream population of carp has fallen by 90 percent, according to Guo Qiaoyu of the Nature Conservancy in Beijing.
Across China’s borders, Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh are heavily dependent on rivers sourced in Tibet. More than 60 percent of Cambodia’s annual fish catch derives from Tonle Sap, a lake which depends on the annual flooding of the Mekong. Over the last decade, as new Chinese dams have come online on the Mekong, depriving the river of floodwaters, the lake has seen a drastic drop in its fish catch. The waters rise and fall at the whim of Chinese engineers.
Then there are the direct human costs of damming and diverting: Whole communities must be relocated from areas flooded by a reservoir. They are often shifted to degraded land, where they live in poverty — driving many to migrate in search of a new life. Estimates vary, but it is thought that over 22 million Chinese have been relocated for hydropower projects since the 1950s.
In Tibet, since the 1990s, at least a million nomads and farmers have been relocated from grasslands to make way for mining ventures and hydropower projects. That represents about one-sixth of the entire Tibetan population. These ‘‘ecological refugees’’ are shunted into substandard ghettoes.
Moreover, China claims complete sovereignty over Tibet’s rivers, intending to do what it wants with the water resources, oblivious to protest from Tibetans and from the people downstream. And there are no international laws to keep Beijing in check.
The United Nations has done too little, too late. In 2014, the United Nations Watercourses Convention came into effect, spelling out guidelines for trans-boundary water-sharing, but this is nonbinding. More to the point, China is not a signatory — and neither are most nations of South Asia.
This will end badly for the nations downstream from Tibet, with great tension generated over competition for increasingly scarce water. And irresponsible damming and water diversion will end badly for China, which is pursuing a suicidal policy of destroying the sources of the Yangtse and Yellow rivers.
Yet the solution to these complex problems is simple: Since these megahydroprojects are state-run and state-financed, they can be canceled with the stroke of a pen by the Chinese leadership. Though campaigns by Chinese environmental nongovernmental organizations have succeeded in stopping some major dam projects, the pro-dam lobby, backed by Chinese consortiums, is powerful.
In Tibet, there are alternatives to disrupting the rivers, although these options are more expensive. Outside of the Sahara, Tibet has the greatest potential on the planet for harnessing solar energy. China, in fact, dominates the world market in solar panel sales, but is using them in Tibet only on a small scale, even though recent technological developments have proven that solar can compete with hydropower.
China is also slated to become the world leader in manufacturing technology for harnessing wind power, but again, this technology is not used much in Tibet.
China’s leaders need to consider the costs of forging ahead with these megahydroprojects. Preserving rivers sourced in Tibet — or lengthy sections of them — is critical for the well-being of the region’s ecosystems. The health of these rivers is of vital concern to all the nations of Asia.
Michael Buckley is author of ‘‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems From the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia.’’
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