IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 22
is involved in building over 125 dams
in Southeast Asia, representing 45%
of all Chinese overseas dams [36].
"According to the Lao government's
own figures, by the end of 2016 Chi-
nese companies had signed up for
US$6.7 billion worth of construction
projects in the country" - some
30% of the total earmarked for Laos'
Mekong basin, making Laos the third-
largest market for China in the Asso-
ciation of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) bloc [37].
The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that
hydropower generation will double
in China between 2008 and 2035,
and triple in India and Africa over
the same period [38]. At least 3700
major dams, each with a capacity of
more than 1 MW, are either planned
or under construction, primarily in
countries with emerging economies.
Experts find that "following a period
of such relative stagnation during
the past 20 years, the current boom
in hydropower dam construction is
truly unprecedented in both scale
and extent [39, p. 162]."
Compounding Effects of the
Contemporary Dam Resurgence
Seeing the mega-dam resurgence
through this lens of major contem-
porary global dynamics has critical
implications for understanding the
impacts of the development trend
itself. For instance, researchers
across various fields are noticing
that not only has the pace of hydro-
power growth been unprecedented,
but the physical and cultural geogra-
phy of where hydropower deve-
lopment is now happening is also
unprecedented. And this geographic
factor is causing major compound-
ing effects on the impacts of our
energy technology solutions.
First, the collective nature of
these shifts has meant that much
of this new energy infrastructure is
being built in tropical and subtropi-
22
cal zones, where the global south's
emerging economy demand is grow-
ing. These zones are also home to
many of our most critically impor-
tant tropical forests, important for
their global carbon stores, important
as sensitive, concentrated zones of
ecological diversity, and critically
important for their cultural signifi-
cance as some of the last remaining
areas of indigenous livelihood in the
world [40]. Given the nature of where
the dam resurgence is happening,
there are enormous human, envi-
ronmental, and cultural costs both
locally and globally.
New evidence finds that the re-
surgence of the large-scale infra-
structure projects through new land
acquisitions in tropical and sub-
tropical zones is directly and simul-
taneously inducing a resurgence of
population displacement and dispos-
session [19, p. 1]. This is at a time
when these very indigenous com-
munities are more vulnerable than
they have ever been to the implica-
tions of displacement due to rampant
environmental degradation, climate
change itself, and urban migration.
In fact some studies suggest that
besides energy security or regional
cooperation one of the primary moti-
vations for Chinese investment in
dams in Southeast Asia outside of
its borders is "to spare China's own
rivers and avoid resettlement" since
domestically the over-damming of
Chinese rivers has already displaced
over 23 million people and signifi-
cantly affected water availability
[36, p. 313].
This displacement is exacerbated
by the fact that tropical rivers are
critical to global food security. In
tropical rivers of Africa, Asia, and
South America, rainfall drives a peri-
odic flood pulse fueling fish produc-
tion and delivering nutrition to more
than 150 million people worldwide
[41]. The Mekong River Basin alone
hosts one of the largest inland fish-
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
eries in the world, and the over 370
individual dam projects proposed
for the basin will likely modulate
this flood pulse, thereby threatening
food security for already margin-
alized communities. The main tool
for environmental governance and
licensing in countries like Laos is
local environmental impact assess-
ment, which in most cases does not
provide adequate technical informa-
tion for, and thus has had minimal
influence on, policy decisions.
China itself has been heavily cri-
ticized for lax environmental and
social impact assessment standards
at home. For instance, over 300 000
deaths have been reported due
to dam failure in China, and it is
believed that the devastating 2008
Sichuan earthquake was triggered
by the province's Zipingpu dam [42].
Since 1949, 23 million Chinese citi-
zens had been relocated for dam
construction, and 6.5 million of
those since 2000. Meanwhile, the
Three Gate Gorges dam was decom-
missioned four short years after
being built due to siltation [43], like
many others, and data shows that
dams in China underperform regard
electricity output, due to increasing
drought and water scarcity. Brazil
is also heavily criticized for weak
licensing regulation for large dams,
and a poor impact assessment pro-
cess, that was further simplified and
weakened in 2012 [44]. Hydroelec-
tric power is particularly damaging in
the Amazon as larger reservoirs are
needed to compensate for lowland
topography. For this reason many
Amazonian dams suffer from chron-
ic siltation, which reduces electric-
ity production, drastically affecting
river ecology. Furthermore, season-
al flow Amazonian rivers means that
many dams perform at only partial
capacity. This lack of transnational
basin-wide assessment often leads
to disjointed project development
with exacerbated impacts [45].
∕
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