The Chinese government has announced that it plans to build as many as 20 hydro electric projects on the Yangtze river by the year 2020. The projects would be aimed at quenching China’s increasing power demand and helping in flood control. However, many domestic and international experts warn about the ecological sensitivity of the area might not be strong enough to cope with such massive infrastructure projects.

Current Problems

The Yangtze already has the world’s largest hydro electric plan in the Three Gorges Dam which, according to some experts, is putting tremendous amounts of pressure on the neighboring areas leading to landslides. Just few weeks ago there were news reports that a landslide in the area, estimated to be 3.6 million cubic meters and covering 100,000 square meters, could fall into the river.

Another problem with large hydro electric projects in China is their vicinity to earthquake prone areas with some of them actually laying over active faults. The Sichuan earthquake last year killed 87,000 people with some experts attributing its cause to the large amount earth pressures exerted by the Zipingpu dam.

Lack of Transparency

China has had a long record of overlooking environmental and ecological aspects related to projects it deems vital to showing off the country’s might and which hold high strategic importance. China went ahead with the railway project in the disputed and ecologically pristine region of Tibet. The Chinese government went ahead with the project costing $4.2 billion, a small sum to cement its claim over Tibet.

The problem with the Chinese system is the excessive secretive manner in which the planning of such projects is carried out. The Chinese government in 2001 had refused to make public the Environmental Impact Assessment report of the Zipingpu dam in the Sichuan province. And while concerns about ecological & environmental aspects of the region remain the government is set to infuse another $14.5 billion into the Three Gorges dam project in addition to the $23.6 billion already spent.

Feeding to its yet another strategic interest of securing unhindered oil supplies, Beijing ordered the construction of an oil refinery cum shortage facility near the environmentally sensitive areain the Nansha district near Hong Kong. The government then directed various Chinese websites to block all information regarding the environmental impacts of the proposed project.

Experts believe that building hydro electric plants in such large numbers would not have adverse social and ecological impacts but would also increase the level of pollution in the rivers as these reservoirs tend to hold up the pollutants thus increasing their concentration.

A great amount of emphasis is given up on the debate that whether China be forced to reduce its carbon emissions or not but there is hardly any talk of the dismal state of China’s EIA procedure. China must be pressurized by the international community especially by the international lending agencies like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the IMF to increase transparency in assessment of impacts of all large scale infrastructure projects.

Image: PVC_G (Creative Commons)