MESINA, MYSTICA LOFIA M.
CE-V
Three Gorges
Dam
Three Gorges Dam Nears Completion
Seth Rosenblatt
The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest
hydropower project and most notorious dam. The
massive project sets records for number of people
displaced (more than 1.2 million), number of cities
and towns flooded (13 cities, 140 towns, 1,350
villages), and length of reservoir (more than 600
kilometers). The project has been plagued by
corruption, spiraling costs, environmental
impacts, human rights violations and resettlement
difficulties.
The Three Gorges Dam is a model for disaster, yet
Chinese companies are replicating this model both
domestically and internationally. Within China, huge
hydropower cascades have been proposed and are
being constructed in some of China’s most pristine
and biologically and culturally diverse river basins -
the Lancang (Upper Mekong) River, Nu
(Salween) River and upstream of Three Gorges Dam
on the Yangtze River and tributaries.The
environmental impacts of the project are profound,
and are likely to get worse as time goes on. The
submergence of hundreds of factories, mines and
waste dumps, and the presence of massive industrial
centers upstream are creating a festering bog of
effluent, silt, industrial pollutants and rubbish in the
reservoir. Erosion of the reservoir and downstream
riverbanks is causing landslides, and threatening one
of the world’s biggest fisheries in the East China Sea.
The weight of the reservoir's water has many
scientists concerned over reservoir-induced
seismicity. Critics have also argued that the project
may have exacerbated recent droughts by
withholding critical water supply to downstream
users and ecoystems, and through the creation of a
microclimate by its giant reservoir. In 2011, China's
highest government body for the first time officially
acknowledged the "urgent problems" of the Three
Gorges Dam.
Pollution in the Three Gorges Reservoir
International Rivers
Through the Three Gorges Project, China has
acquired the know-how to build large hydropower
schemes, and has begun exporting similar
projects around the world. Now that the project's
problems have been acknowledged, it is important
to draw lessons from the experience so that the
problems of the Yangtze dam are not repeated.
While Three Gorges is the world’s biggest hydro
project, the problems at Three Gorges are not
unique. Around the world, large dams are causing
social and environmental devastation while better
alternatives are being ignored.
International Rivers protects rivers and defends the
rights of the communities which depend on them.
We monitor the social and environmental problems
of the Three Gorges Dam, and work to ensure that
the right lessons are drawn for energy and water
projects in China and around the world.
Chinese Government Acknowledges Problems of
Three Gorges Dam
The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River
In an unexpected statement, China’s government
has just acknowledged the serious problems of
the Three Gorges Dam. “The project is now greatly
benefiting the society in the aspects of flood
prevention, power generation, river transportation
and water resource utilization,” the government
maintained, but it has also “caused some urgent
problems in terms of environmental protection, the
prevention of geological hazards and the welfare of
the relocated communities.” On the same day, it
announced concrete measures to improve the living
conditions of the displaced people, protect the
Yangtze’s ecosystem and prevent geological
disasters. What is new about this acknowledgment?
And what does it mean for China’s future dam
building plans?
Chinese government officials have admitted the
problems of the world’s largest hydropower project
on the Yangtze River before. “We thought of all the
possible issues,” Weng Lida, the secretary general of
the Yangtze River Forum, told the Wall Street
Journal in August 2007. “But the problems are all
more serious than we expected.” Around the same
time, senior officials warned that the project had
caused an array of ecological problems, including
more frequent landslides and pollution, which could
result in an environmental “catastrophe” if
preventive measures were not taken. (You can find
a summary of the social, environmental and
geological problems of the project in our factsheet
from November 2009.)
The undammed Nu River in China's Southwest
For a few years, the Chinese government appeared
to heed the lessons from the Three Gorges Dam.
Several destructive new projects on the Yangtze and
other rivers were suspended. Representatives of
China’s well-connected hydropower bureaucracy
have complained that this period, when fewer dams
than planned were built, were “wasted years.” “We
must proceed [with hydropower dams],” an official
from the Nu Valley in Yunnan Province commented
in January. “The resources here are too good; not to
develop is not an option.”
The hydropower lobbyists seem to have kept the
upper hand within China’s government. In February,
the head of the National Energy Administration
announced that under its new Five-Year Plan, the
government was going to approve no less than 140
gigawatts of new hydropower projects. This amounts
to seven Three Gorges dams and is more than any
other country has built in its entire history. The
energy administration plans to build new dam
cascades on the Nu River, the middle and upper
reaches of the Yangtze and its tributaries, and the
upper Mekong.
China’s National People’s Congress adopted the new
Five-Year Plan in March, but the plan for the energy
sector is still under discussion. The opinions within
the government appear to be sharply divided.
Pushing back against the dam builders, a senior
official in the Ministry of Environmental Protection
warned that “hydropower could cause more severe
pollution than coal-fired power plants” in terms of
ecological impacts, resettlement problems and
geological hazards.
Sun and Xu submitted their findings to the Premier
Wen Jiabao, who is a geologist himself. After the
earthquake disaster in Japan, the seismic and
geological risks of dams could no longer be ignored.
In April, Hu Siyi, a vice-minister of water resources,
called the risk of earthquakes and other natural
disasters the biggest obstacle to dam building in the
country’s Southwest. He acknowledged that the
ability of water projects “to resist floods,
earthquakes and other natural disasters has become
an issue of increasing public concern.”

Landslide on the Three Gorges reservoir

As yesterday’s government statement confirms, a
key lesson of the Three Gorges Project is that dams
can have serious geological impacts. The fluctuating
water levels of the reservoir on the Yangtze have
destabilized hundreds of miles of slopes
and triggered massive landslides. Most of the
projects discussed under the new Five-Year Plan
would be built in China’s mountainous Southwestern
region, which is seismically active. The devastating
earthquake of 2008 in Sichuan Province, which
damaged hundreds of dams and may have
been triggered by a reservoir, further illustrated the
risk of building hydropower projects on fault lines.

Environmental organizations invited Sun Wenpeng

and Xu Daoyi, two senior Chinese geologists, to pay a
field visit to the Nu Valley to investigate the region’s
unique tectonic formations. They found that “the
tectonic movement in the Three Parallel Rivers area
[of the Nu, upper Mekong and upper Yangtze] is
stronger than anywhere in the world – how can they
build a cascade of dams here?” The scientists also
warned that the proposed dams “may increase the
risks of geological disasters.”