The Kruonis pumped-storage hydropower plant complements the one in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. There are more than 500 of these "water batteries" in the world, and the mountainous geography favors their development in Latin America. Credit: Andrius Aleksandravicius / Ignitis

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 2 2025 (IPS)

Having hydroelectric power without damming rivers, dismantling the environment or displacing populations is possible in Latin America and the Caribbean, with reversible power plants that take advantage of their mountainous geography, and pave the way for only renewable sources to generate electricity.

“The development of these plants requires areas with a difference in altitude, for two reservoirs, one upper and one lower. And the region has hundreds of possible sites for pumped storage,” said Arturo Alarcón, a senior specialist at the Energy Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)."These plants requires areas with a difference in height, for two reservoirs, one upper and one lower. And the region has hundreds of possible sites for pumped storage. A recent IDB study identified 179 sites in 11 countries": Arturo Alarcón.

In countries crisscrossed by mountain ranges, in Brazil and even in the insular Caribbean, there are plenty of areas that could host these hydroelectric dams, says the Bolivian expert. “A recent IDB study identified 179 sites in 11 countries,” he told IPS from Washington.

Traditional hydropower plants dam the waters of a river, creating an artificial lake that provides water to drive turbines in an engine room that generates electricity. This is taken by transformers and transmission lines to consumption centres, and then the water is dumped and the river flows on to the sea.

In contrast, pumped-storage plants are fed with water from a reservoir at a certain height, which supplies the water, usually through a tunnel or canal, does the work in the engine room and deposits the water in a reservoir located at a lower altitude.

When the process is finished – after the hours of electricity generation due to increased demand, required from other sources – the water is pumped back from the lower to the upper reservoir, where it is available to start a new cycle.

These are power plants that can complement solar or wind energy parks, which are fed by solar radiation or wind power, thus subject to hourly and seasonal variations that require energy to be stored in batteries.

Diagram of the operation of a pumped hydro power plant. When the demand for electricity grows, the flow of water from the upper reservoir activates the turbines and, when its contribution to the system is no longer needed, the flow is reversed by pumping from the lower reservoir, leaving the whole as a water battery. Credit: Iberdrola

Supplementary batteries

For this reason, pumped-storage power plants are also called “water batteries”.

By reducing the need for fossil-fuelled thermal power plants, they become tools for decarbonising the entire electricity system.

“Although these plants do not generate more energy than they consume in the pumping process (for every megawatt hour generated, approximately 1.2 MWh is consumed), they do play a critical role in the integration of variable renewable energies such as solar and wind,” says Alarcón.

For example, in Brazil, where about 90% electricity is generated from renewable sources, wind and solar installations are growing, “which depend on weather conditions and there is no constant production throughout the day,” expert Caio Leocádio told IPS from Rio de Janeiro.

“This condition creates a favourable scenario for technologies that meet these requirements, with flexibility and storage capacity, allowing energy to be stored in times of surplus and used in times of greater demand,” says Leocádio, a consultant with the Brazilian Energy Research Company (EPE).

It is not a new technology. Around the world, some 200 gigawatts (one Gw equals 1000 Mw) have been installed in 510 pumped-storage power plants, equivalent to the entire hydroelectric capacity of Latin America.

In the region, the Rio Grande Hydroelectric Complex in the central Argentine province of Cordoba, with its Cerro Pelado and Arroyo Corte reservoirs, 12 kilometres apart, has been in operation since 1986 and has an installed capacity of 750 MWh, which is currently reduced due to equipment obsolescence.

The engine room of the Río Grande Complex, a reversible power plant in the province of Córdoba in north-central Argentina. Credit: Epec

 Favorable cost

So far, the level of development of pumped hydroelectricity shows that costs are competitive, although the economic performance of each facility and in each country depends on the type of electricity market.

For example, if it is an electricity market that has hourly energy prices, or that values the ancillary services that reversible plants can provide, such as maintaining a constant voltage despite fluctuations, a good economic performance can be achieved.

In terms of prices, the region has very disparate tariffs. Residential rates in some Caribbean islands exceed 40 US cents per kWh, in Guatemala 29, in Honduras and Uruguay 25, in Colombia 20, in Brazil and Costa Rica 16, in Mexico 10 and in Venezuela six cents, according to the  Global Petrol Prices website.

“The installation cost of reversible power plants can be high due to infrastructure and technical needs, but operating and maintenance costs are relatively low once they are up and running,” Alarcón noted.

Nightlife on the famous Copacabana beach in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. The growing demand for energy and the need to maintain a stable supply with electricity generated from renewable sources opens up opportunities for pumped-storage power plants. Credit: Inoutviajes

In Brazil, “projects of this type really require high initial investments, mainly in civil works and equipment,” Leocádio said. “Values are estimates between US$1,200 and 1,600 per kilowatt (kWh) installed, within the range of medium to large projects in the sector,” he added.

In the Dominican Republic, which is considering installing pumped-storage plants in the areas of Sabaneta (northwest) and Guaigui (centre), of 200 and 300 MWh respectively, installation costs are estimated at between US$1900 and 2400 per kilowatt.

But, on the other hand, experts agree that the projects have a useful life of 50 years or more, and although the return on investment requires a long term, these plants offer a stable and predictable performance.

This is the advantage Leocádio sees in Brazil, with its highly interconnected electricity system and wealth of sites for potential installation. A recent study found that in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone (43 750 square kilometres) there are 15 locations with ideal conditions for such plants.

Brazil’s gigantic Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River has altered watercourses, displaced populations, disrupted indigenous communities, agriculture and other livelihoods, increased deforestation and loss of biodiversity. Pumped-storage power plants can avoid many of these impacts. Credit: Bruno Batista / Vice-Presidency Brazil

Regulation and environment

For Alarcón, “the biggest challenge for this technology in Latin America and the Caribbean is regulatory. Not all electricity markets have adequate remuneration mechanisms for storage technologies or those that provide flexibility to electricity systems,” he said.

Therefore, among the tasks to be addressed in the region, along with investigating the specific areas that have the greatest potential for water batteries, Alarcón identified dialogue between governments and private actors, plus conferences and regional forums “to create a regulatory framework that facilitates these projects”.

That possibility – and also the contrasts – are shown by recent cases in Chile.  The Espejo de Tarapacá project, for a 300 MWh reversible power plant that plans to work with seawater, has advanced, but another, Paposo, in the north, was rejected by the Environmental Evaluation Service.

Advocates of pumped-storage power plants point out that their construction and operation require minimal alteration of the environment, as they do not require the diversion or damming of rivers, flooding of towns or farmland, or affecting the areas of indigenous peoples and peasant communities.

Since they do not alter large areas, they do not affect biodiversity, and in some cases can be sources of water for irrigation and sites that beautify or refresh landscapes.

But the central issue is their contribution to the stability of electricity systems and to the decarbonisation required by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which propose to increase the use of renewable energies along with access to electricity for all peoples.

By February 2025, according to the most recent report by the Latin American Energy Organisation (OLADE), total electricity generation in the region will reach 152 terawatts (Twh, one million megawatts), with 68.1% from renewable sources and 31.9% using oil, gas, coal or nuclear energy.

The largest source of renewable energy is hydroelectric (53.1% of the total), followed by wind (8.5%), solar (4.5%), bioenergy (1.5%) and geothermal energy (0.5%).

The Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on the Xingu River in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. With a capacity of 11,233 megawatts, it began operating in 2016 and caused severe environmental and social damage in the Volta Grande do Xingu, a river curve where most of the water was diverted into a channel for power generation. Credit: Joédson Alves / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 25 2025 (IPS)

Indigenous peoples in Brazil have won a new right: a share in the profits of hydroelectric plants that cause them harm when built on or near their lands. 

This was established in a preliminary ruling by Supreme Court Justice Flavio Dino, who on Tuesday, March 11, recognized this right for Indigenous communities living in the Volta Grande do Xingu (VGX), a 100-kilometer stretch of the Amazon’s Xingu River. Most of its water flow was diverted into a channel for electricity generation.

The ruling responds to a petition from seven Indigenous associations in the VGX and still awaits ratification by the other 10 Supreme Court justices by late March. However, approval is virtually certain, as it aligns with Brazil’s 1988 Constitution.

It took 37 years for this constitutional benefit to take effect because the National Congress failed to pass a law regulating compensation for the impacts of energy and mining projects on Indigenous lands, Justice Dino noted in his 115-point, 61-page ruling.

Now, 100% of the royalties that the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant paid to the federal government as compensation for water use will go to the residents of three Indigenous territories affected by the permanent “drought” in the VGX, home to 1,324 people according to the 2022 national census.

Lawyers representing the Indigenous cause estimate this amounts to around 210 million reais per year (approximately US$36 million at current exchange rates).

The funds will be used collectively for community benefit. Justice Dino specified purposes such as expanding the Bolsa Família (a direct income transfer program) in affected villages, sustainable development projects, improving educational and health infrastructure, territorial security, reforestation, and demarcation of additional Indigenous lands.

Wild fruits that feed fish now fall on dry land due to the reduced flow in the Volta Grande do Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon. Its waters were diverted for the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant’s channel. Credit: Mati / VGX

A Right for All

This right extends to other similar cases—though not to mining—as there is still no legislation regulating constitutional provisions ensuring affected communities’ share in profits from hydroelectric and mining activities in “border zones or Indigenous lands.”

Justice Dino also set a 24-month deadline for Congress to finally approve regulations for such cases.

“Royalties are a victory. For the first time, we’ve gained a benefit—all we’ve had so far are losses because of the Belo Monte dam,” said Gilliard Juruna, chief of the Miratu village of the Juruna people (who are reclaiming their original name, Yudjá, meaning “the river’s owners”).

“Since 2019, fish no longer reproduce normally in the Volta Grande do Xingu,” the Indigenous leader told IPS by phone from his village in the municipality of Vitória do Xingu. Like most Brazilian Indigenous groups, the Juruna use their ethnic name as their surname.

The reason is that Belo Monte’s operation “steals” too much water from the VGX, a U-shaped stretch. The original dam project, designed in the 1970s under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), planned to flood 1,225 square kilometers of forest in the Volta Grande, including two Indigenous territories along its banks.

Stalled by Indigenous resistance and surplus energy from other large dams, the project was revived this century with a redesign to avoid flooding the VGX by diverting water through a channel.

But diverting enough water for a 11,000-megawatt plant (the world’s fourth-largest, operating at full capacity since 2019) has condemned the VGX to permanent drought, destroying the Indigenous and riverside communities’ way of life, which depended on fishing and river transport.

A constant legal battle pits Norte Energía, Belo Monte’s private operator, against environmental authorities demanding higher water flows in the VGX to ensure fish reproduction and ecosystem survival.

Court rulings have fluctuated, especially after environmental disasters and the expiration of Belo Monte’s operating license in 2021. The Brazilian Institute of the Environment now seeks to tie license renewal to a more ecosystem-friendly water flow schedule (hydrogram).

While awaiting renewal, the plant operates at only 31% capacity. Water releases for the river bend are dictated by power generation targets, ignoring the dehydrated stretch’s ecological needs.

The dehydrated or dried-up Xingu River forms small isolated ponds where trapped fish die. Before being diverted to supply the Belo Monte plant, it was connected to the river’s main flow. Credit: Mati / VGX

The Juruna lead an Independent Territorial Environmental Monitoring (Mati) initiative, tracking fish populations and other indicators based on water flow variations. Other Indigenous groups, riverside communities, and researchers also participate.

Their findings show that higher water levels from December to March (fish spawning season) are essential for life in the VGX. They’ve proposed a new hydrogram that, while not restoring natural flows, would mitigate current damage.

The piracema, the local spawning season for the inhabitants of the Xingu, must have enough water for the females to lay their eggs and for the fry to feed and grow. Without water, this process cannot occur, and sometimes—due to the sudden reduction in water flow caused by Belo Monte—the eggs or fry die on dry land, according to Josiel Juruna, coordinator of Mati.

“We’ll keep fighting for more water in the Volta Grande—for us, it’s life,” said Gilliard Juruna. But his people are adapting, turning to farming after commercial fishing collapsed. They are no longer commercial fishermen, only fishing for their own consumption—which is no longer guaranteed either.

The Juruna leader now grows cacao, whose price is on the rise, but they need technical support, irrigation, and fertilizers.

The compensation programs that Belo Monte is required to implement and fund, as a counterpart to harnessing the river’s energy potential, are not progressing. The company’s initiatives to support Juruna agriculture contribute little.

While schools are improving, and the village will have secondary education starting in 2026, there are no income-generating projects to replace lost fishing livelihoods, Gilliard Juruna lamented.

Though welcomed, royalties may further erode traditional Indigenous life.

One concern is that financial compensation could make it easier to license new hydro and mining projects, harming nature and Indigenous ways of life.

There have long been efforts to open Indigenous lands to destructive activities like mining—now under discussion in the Supreme Court, led by Justice Gilmar Mendes.

Royalties can encourage harmful projects to exploit mining and water resources in indigenous lands, “the most protected areas in Brazil”, agrees biologist Juarez Pezutti, a professor at the Federal University of Pará, who has participated in several environmental research projects in the Vuelta Grande.

Predatory activities in indigenous areas destroy their ecosystem services, cause social disasters, as seen in the Xingu, and lead to obesity, diabetes and other diseases, such as those that occur among Native peoples in the United States and Canada, whose territories are occupied by mining, he told IPS by telephone from Belém, capital of the Amazonian state of Pará, where Belo Monte is located.

Judge Dino is aware of these risks, which is why he insisted several times in his ruling that the decision on Belo Monte’s royalties “does not release any and all exploitation of the energy potential of water resources on indigenous lands.”

Such projects still require state approval and compliance with International Labour Organization Convention 169, which mandates free, prior, and informed consent from affected Indigenous communities.

Luis Aviles, standing on a segment of the rock embankment that protects riverbank communities from the overflow of the Lempa River in southern El Salvador, points to the part of the river that makes a turn in its course and hits the levee hard, undermining it. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
TECOLUCA, El Salvador, Nov 30 2023 (IPS)

For decades, poor fishing and farming communities in southern El Salvador have paid the price for the electricity generated by one of the country’s five dams, as constant and sometimes extreme rains cause the reservoir to release water that ends up flooding the low-lying area where the families live.

"Certainly there is climate injustice: richer people or sectors of the country, who live in urban areas, benefit more from energy, while poor families, who live on the banks of the rivers, take the hit." -- Ricardo Navarro
Dozens of communities located in the Bajo Lempa area in southern El Salvador suffer year after year from flooding during the May to November rainy season, when the river overflows its banks and floods corn, beans, and other crops, as well as affecting fishing and other livelihoods.

The ecoregion is the lower stretch of the Lempa River basin, which runs through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until flowing into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country.

The Lempa River basin covers 18,240 square kilometers, shared with Honduras (30 percent) and Guatemala (14 percent). In El Salvador, it stretches across slightly more than half of the territory of just over 21,000 square kilometers.

An estimated 5,000 families live in the 900-square-kilometer Bajo Lempa area. They are dedicated to subsistence farming and fishing and non-intensive cattle ranching, although there are also some families from other regions of the country, with more money, who have acquired land to grow sugar cane.

Celina Menjívar (R), a resident of San Bartolo, one of the ten settlements located in the Bajo Lempa area near the mouth of the river on the Pacific Ocean, participates in a neighborhood meeting. She makes the case that the Salvadoran government ought to reimburse local families for the crops they lost as a result of flooding from an upstream dam. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“In the 32 years that I have lived here, I have been affected just like the rest by many floods,” Celina Menjívar told IPS. She is a farmer in San Bartolo, one of the settlements or communities of Bajo Lempa.

“I plant corn, sesame, and cushaw squash (Cucurbita argyrosperma) on a small family plot, but when the floods come, everything is lost, and in the end we are left with nothing,” said Menjívar, 41.

In addition to subsistence farming, a group of some 50 families set up a cooperative for the organic production of cashew nuts, which they were able to export to the United States, France, and the United Kingdom after achieving certification as organic producers.

An aerial view of the state-owned 15 de Septiembre Hydroelectric Power Plant, the largest in El Salvador. The reservoir discharges when rainfall exceeds its storage capacity, causing the Lempa River to overflow and flood dozens of farming and fishing communities in the Bajo Lempa area. Credit: CEL

But rising production costs and competition from cheaper prices, especially from India, have hampered exports in the last two years. The cooperative is therefore looking to promote new products, such as pistachios and peanuts.

“We have made an effort to ensure that the farmers can at least sell their cashew seeds” on the domestic market, the cooperative’s administrative coordinator, Brenda Cerén, told IPS.

Impact on the Most Vulnerable

Most of the residents of Bajo Lempa were part of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas, who settled on the riverbanks after receiving land in the region as part of the demobilization process at the end of the civil war in 1992.

El Salvador’s bloody civil war (1980–1992) left some 75,000 people dead and 8,000 missing in a country that currently has 7.6 million inhabitants.

“Most of the flooding is not due to the rains per se, but to the discharges from the reservoir,” said Menjívar, referring to the state-owned 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest, located upstream between the departments of San Vicente and Usulután, in central El Salvador.

Manuel Mejía is one of the former guerrilla fighters who received a hectare of land in Bajo Lempa in southern El Salvador, to settle there as part of the demobilization process of the rebel forces at the end of the 12-year Salvadoran civil war in 1992. Now, when the area is flooded by the overflowing river, he says everything is lost, even household goods. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Another resident of San Bartolo, Manuel Mejía, added: “When there are floods here, everything is lost: crops, livestock, even household goods, everything.”

Mejía, a 77-year-old former guerrilla fighter, told IPS that this year’s rainy season did not produce flooding because the storms began late, and this meant that the drainage channels, located along the road leading to the area, did not fill up and were able to handle the rainfall at the end of the rainy season in November.

Increasingly unpredictable and extreme rainfall periods, due to climate change, generate intense storms in short periods of time, and, as a consequence, the reservoir’s capacity is easily exceeded and water releases are authorized.

Hence, the poor families of Bajo Lempa pay the cost of the dam’s ability to generate electricity for other parts of the country, including those that generate the most income, such as industrial groups and real estate consortiums, whose business activities are among those that have the greatest impact on the environment.

Part of the levee that has been undermined by the force of the waters of the Lempa River, near the Rancho Grande community in the Bajo Lempa, a coastal ecoregion located in the municipality of Tecoluca in southern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

This situation falls under the category of climate justice, or, actually, climate injustice: vulnerable groups are more heavily impacted by extreme weather events fomented by others, whether at the national or global level.

“Certainly there is climate injustice: richer people or sectors of the country, who live in urban areas, benefit more from energy, while poor families, who live on the banks of the rivers, take the hit,” environmentalist Ricardo Navarro, director of the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology, told IPS.

The Center is a local affiliate of the international NGO Friends of the Earth.

A light rain that falls for two or three days generates releases from the dam and the overflowing of the Lempa River, which floods the settlements. But of course, the most tragic floods have been caused by tropical storms or hurricanes, such as Hurricane Mitch in October 1998.

The Lempa River flows through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until it flows into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Mitch, a category 5 hurricane, the most lethal, caused such heavy rains that the hydroelectric dam filled in a matter of 36 hours and went from discharging 500 cubic meters per second to 11,500 cubic meters per second, according to a study on flooding in the Lower Lempa.

“During Mitch, I lost 40 heads of cattle; they drowned,” Luis Avilés, a farmer from the Taura community, told IPS.

“Where we live is like living with a chronic illness; year after year we have this anxiety: wondering whether it will flood a lot this year, if I’ll lose my crops, not knowing whether to plant or not,” said Avilés, 53.

The Lempa River flows through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until it flows into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Embankment on the Verge of Collapse

A crucial issue in the impact of the floods is the damage that has been suffered over the years to the levee built with Japanese aid funds years ago and which has not been repaired since then, residents of Bajo Lempa told IPS.

The elevation made of different materials on the river bank to contain the overflowing waters runs 18 kilometers along the right bank of the river, from the Cañada Arenera community, in the municipality of San Nicolás Lempa, to the community of La Pita, near the river’s mouth.

“We are in the most vulnerable area of the riverbank, the one that receives the strongest impact of the Lempa, because up there it makes a turn and then it flows down with force,” said Avilés, standing on the damaged infrastructure: a wall of rocks tied together with wire, about four meters higher than the level of the river.

Drainage ditches can be seen alongside the road leading to Bajo Lempa in southern El Salvador, to drain the water that accumulates with the rains and floods that occur almost every year in this coastal region of El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

This segment of the five-kilometer-long levee is indeed the most damaged; the flow of the river has been undermining the base of the wall more and more.

“This wall protects the communities of Santa Marta, San Bartolo, Rancho Grande, Taura, Puerto Nuevo, Naranjo, and La Pita, and if it were to collapse, it would be a great tragedy,” said Avilés, also a former guerrilla fighter.

The deterioration of the stone embankment is clearly visible along its five-kilometer length.

The production of cooking bananas is one of the most profitable in the coastal area known as Bajo Lempa, although floods frequently swamp crops and ruin the harvests on family farms. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The rest of the dike is not a stone wall but an earthen elevation about two meters high, and it is also damaged.

The repair and maintenance of the embankment is one of the main demands of the inhabitants of Bajo Lempa, but it has never been efficiently addressed by any of the past governments.

Brena Cerén, administration coordinator, shows part of the organic cashew nut production just out of the ovens of the cooperative set up in San Carlos Lempa, in the Salvadoran municipality of Tecoluca. Cashew nut production in the coastal area of the country has a growing market in the United States and European countries. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Compensation for Damage

Avilés said it is obvious that the country needs to generate electricity “because many sectors, factories, industry, and homes depend on it, but we should also consider the cost that we pay down here,” referring to the energy produced by the 15 de Septiembre power plant.

This dam and the other four in the country are managed by the state-owned Comisión Ejecutiva Hidroeléctrica del Río Lempa (CEL). For this reason, he and the other people interviewed argued that the government should take responsibility for the damage and losses caused to the families of Bajo Lempa and create an indemnity or compensation fund.

Avilés said that last year, when there was light flooding, he lost his crop of plantains or cooking bananas, which he had planted on a two-hectare plot. He went to claim compensation from CEL for the 15,000 dollars he had invested.

“They told me that they had nothing to do with it, that the dam was above us and the flooding was below,” he said.

Sugarcane monoculture, practiced by families that have invaded and grabbed land in the coastal area of Bajo Lempa, in southern El Salvador, has damaged the fragile ecosystem of the area as it encourages the intensive use of agrochemicals and the burning of sugarcane fields, which often reach the crops of riverbank communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Environmental activist Gabriel Labrador, of the NGO Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UES), told IPS that these families have every right to demand an economic compensation fund for losses and damage.

“It is an injustice—the discharges, the vulnerabilities to which people and territories are exposed—which is a systematic practice that is unjust and ends up burdening the most disadvantaged people with more damage and losses,” he said.

Meanwhile, the residents of Bajo Lempa, already accustomed to the floods, know that they have no choice but to continue fighting, despite the adversities.

“It would be fair for CEL to say, ‘We are going to help you, at least with 50 percent of what was lost’, but it doesn’t give anything. However, we have no choice but to keep working hard,” said Menjívar.

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Excerpt:

With a storage capacity of 580 million cubic meters and an irrigation target of 22,500 hectares, the Picachos dam in the state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, will also generate 15 megawatts of electricity. CREDIT: Conagua

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 7 2022 (IPS)

The Mexican government is prioritizing the construction and modernization of mega water projects, without considering their impacts and long-term viability, according to a number of experts and activists.

Dams, reservoirs, canals and aqueducts are part of the new infrastructure aimed at ensuring water supply in areas facing shortages, but without addressing underlying problems such as waste, leaks, pollution and the impact of the climate crisis, like droughts.

One of the flagship projects is Agua Saludable para la Laguna (ASL), which will serve five municipalities in the northern state of Coahuila and four in the neighboring region of Durango, benefiting 1.6 million people.

Gerardo Jiménez, a member of the non-governmental Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero – an umbrella group made up of 12 organizations of people from local communities – said the ASL initiative launched in 2020 neglects the structural causes of the water crisis, water pollution and the overexploitation of water sources.

“It focuses on effects, shortages and pollution. It is designed for a 25-year period and is based on a vulnerable source. There is illegal water extraction and contraband. It does not provide alternative solutions,” he told IPS from the city of Torreón.

Five of the eight aquifers in the area that provide water are overexploited. The Principal-Región Lagunera is the most important, supplying four cities.

The reservoir becomes cyclically deficient, as its annual extraction exceeds its recharge. In addition, the water contains arsenic above the limits established by Mexican regulations and the World Health Organization (WHO).

ASL includes the construction of a water treatment plant, with a capacity of 6.34 cubic meters (m3) per second, a diversion channel and an aqueduct to transport 200 million m3 per year from the Nazas River.

At a cost of 485 million dollars, the project is part of a network of new water infrastructure promoted by the National Water Commission (Conagua), Mexico’s water regulatory agency, several of which are being challenged by social organizations and communities, in some cases through the courts.

The project also includes a diversion dam, a pumping plant, storage tanks and distribution branches.

It will start operations in 2023 and will also harness runoff from the Francisco Zarco reservoir, popularly known as Las Tórtolas, and the Lázaro Cárdenas reservoir, known as El Palmito.

These reservoirs could reduce their water supply due to the drought that has affected the area in recent years. The lack of rain is plaguing half of Coahuila, a situation set to worsen in the coming months with the arrival of the dry season.

Both dams are almost overflowing at present, but that level should change when the dry season starts.

Conagua’s budget has recovered from previous years, from 1.4 billion dollars in 2017 to 1.6 billion dollars in 2022, concentrated primarily in works to prevent floods, due to their high human and economic costs.

Mexico, a country of nearly 129 million people, is highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate emergency, such as droughts, intense storms, floods, and rising temperatures and sea levels. While the south and southeast have water in excess, people in the center to the north face water shortages.

This Latin American nation has a high risk of water stress, according to the Aqueduct water risk atlas of the Aqueduct Alliance, a coalition of governments, companies and foundations. In fact, Mexico is the second most water-stressed country in the Americas, only behind Chile.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (C) visited in September 2021 the Santa María dam in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, intended to strengthen agricultural irrigation and generate electricity. CREDIT: Conagua

Conventional approach

Another key project is the Libertad Dam, whose construction began in 2020 and is scheduled to be completed in 2023, with 132 million dollars in financing. Designed to take advantage of runoff from the Potosí River, the reservoir will provide 1.5 m3/s to meet demand in 24 of the 51 municipalities in the northeastern state of Nuevo León, serving 4.8 million people.

Aldo Ramírez, a researcher at the private Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, said large infrastructure and environmentally friendly works should coexist, as they make different contributions, based on a vision of urban development with an adequate hydrological focus.

“Both approaches have their advantages in certain niches,” he told IPS from Monterrey, the state capital. “When we think about water management in cities, many years ago the focus was on removing the water as quickly as possible so that it wouldn’t cause problems. Green infrastructure can help a lot, it has great environmental value, in water management and aquifer recharge.”

Like other areas of the country, Monterrey and its outlying neighborhoods, made up of 13 municipalities and inhabited by more than five million people, depends on the supply of water from the El Cuchillo, Rodrigo Gómez or La Boca and Cerro Prieto dams. The first holds half of its capacity, while the other two barely store any water, according to Conagua data.

Through a presidential decree published in November, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador classified projects that he considers to be of public interest and of national security as high priority and/or strategic for national development.

Among them are hydraulic and water projects, which will receive provisional express permits, in a measure questioned by environmental organizations due to the violation of impact evaluation procedures.

ASL, for example, still faces a challenge filed by the Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero, while five others were withdrawn after agreeing with the government to review the project. But if this agreement is not respected, the threat of legal action remains.

More and more water

Northwest Mexico faces a similar situation to the other regions in crisis and the government is building two reservoirs and a canal, and upgrading an aqueduct.

In the state of Sinaloa, construction of the Santa María dam on the Baluarte River is moving ahead and it should also be completed in 2023, to irrigate 24,250 hectares in two municipalities. In addition, it will generate 30 megawatts (MW) of electricity, with an investment of almost one billion dollars.

The Picachos dam is also undergoing modernization, with the installation of turbines to generate 15 MW of electricity and the irrigation of 22,500 hectares. With a storage capacity of 580 million m3, it holds 322 million m3 and will cost about 136 million dollars.

To the south, in the state of Nayarit, the 58-kilometer-long Centenario Canal, with a capacity of 60 m3/s, is being built to irrigate 43,105 hectares in four municipalities. With an investment of 437 million dollars, it will serve some 7,500 farmers with water from the El Jileño and Aguamilpa reservoirs, supplied by the Santiago River.

In addition, the government agreed with opponents of the El Zapotillo dam, in the western state of Jalisco, to leave the dam at a height of 80 meters and operate at 50 percent capacity, so as not to flood three towns, in order for the project, worth some 340 million dollars and with a capacity of 411 million m3, to start operating.

But the construction of new dams has ecological repercussions, such as the modification of the landscape, the generation of methane and the displacement of people, as evidenced by several recent scientific studies.

In the northern city of Tijuana, on the border with the United States, the government is upgrading the Río Colorado-Tijuana aqueduct, which transfers water from the Colorado River, shared by both countries, to meet urban and agricultural demand in the area, at a cost of 47 million dollars.

Jiménez, of the Encuentro Ciudadano Lagunero, calls for the regulation of the extraction of water from the Lázaro Cárdenas reservoir on the Nazas River, as well as from the wells, a more precise extraction measurement system, a fight against illegal concession trafficking and the maintenance of the urban water distribution network.

“An urgent measure must be taken so that in the medium term extraction equals the level of concessions and in the long term extraction equals recharge. We are talking about modifying agricultural production conditions and being more efficient in the use of water,” he said.

In his opinion, “this situation anticipates recurring crises. If it is not addressed, it will worsen, and it is not necessary to reach that crisis.”

But, in the midst of this complex scenario, he warned of the lack of political decision to change the country’s water policy. “The human right to water is not being fulfilled here,” he said.

Ramirez the researcher highlighted measures underway, such as pressure management to reduce leaks, the review of wells assigned to industry, the reuse of treated wastewater and demand management.

“We need to make more efficient use of water. We still have a margin of consumption, but we need to come up with more environmentally friendly solutions. We are heading towards a water crisis,” he said.

Local residents of Churia, a village of some 25 families at more than 3,100 meters above sea level in the highlands of the Peruvian department of Ayacucho, are building simple dikes to fill ponds with water to irrigate their crops, water their animals and consume at home. CREDIT: Courtesy of Huñuc Mayu

By Mariela Jara
AYACUCHO, Peru, Jun 29 2020 (IPS)

A communally built small dam at almost 3,500 meters above sea level supplies water to small-scale farmer Cristina Azpur and her two young daughters in Peru’s Andes highlands, where they face water shortages exacerbated by climate change.

“We built the walls of the reservoir with stone and earth and planted ‘queñua’ trees last year in February, to absorb water,” she tells IPS by phone from her hometown of Chungui, population 4,500, located in La Mar, one of the provinces hardest hit by the violence of the Maoist group Shining Path, which triggered a 20-year civil war in the country between 1980 and 2000.

The queñua (Polylepis racemosa) is a tree native to the Andean highlands with a thick trunk that protects it from low temperatures. It is highly absorbent of rainwater and is considered sacred by the Quechua indigenous people.

In Chungui and other Andes highlands municipalities populated by Quechua Indians in the southwestern department of Ayacucho, the native tree species has been the main input for the recovery and preservation of water sources.

Eutropia Medina, president of the board of directors of Huñuc Mayu (which means “meeting of rivers” in Quechua), an NGO that has been working for 15 years to promote the rights of people living in rural communities in the region, one of the country’s poorest, explains how the trees are used.

Women from several Andean highlands communities in Ayacucho, Peru, have played a very active role in harvesting water, including protecting the headwaters of streams. In the picture, a group of women and girls are involved in a community activity in Oronccoy, a village about 3,200 meters above sea level. CREDIT: Courtesy of Huñuc Mayu

“The women and men have planted more than 10,000 queñua trees in the different communities as part of their plan to harvest water,” she tells IPS in Ayacucho, the regional capital. “These are techniques handed down from their ancestors that we have helped revive to boost their agricultural and animal husbandry activities, which are their main livelihood.”

Medina, previously director of the NGO, explains that the acceleration of climate change in recent years, due to the unregulated exploitation of natural resources, has generated an imbalance in highland ecosystems, increasing greenhouse gases and fuelling deglaciation and desertification.

The resultant water shortages have been particularly difficult for women, who are in charge of domestic responsibilities and supplying water, while also working in the fields.

Huñuc Mayu, with the support of the national office of Diakonia, a faith-based Swedish development organisation, has provided training and technical assistance to strengthen water security in these rural Andean highland communities where the main activities are small-scale farming and livestock raising.

The queñua, one of the most cold-resistant trees in the world, is native to the high plains of the Andes, and is culturally valued by the Quechua indigenous people. It is a great climate regulator, controls erosion and stores a large amount of water, which filters into the soil and from there nourishes the springs of the Andean highlands. CREDIT: Esteban Vera/Flickr

This is an area that has recently been repopulated after two decades in which families fled the internal conflict, during which Ayacucho accounted for 40 percent of all victims.

“Huñuc Mayu helped organise the returnees and people who had remained in the communities, and we promoted the planting of fruit trees and connections to markets,”

She explains that “in this process more water and technical forms of irrigation were needed, so through a water fund the communities created projects for the conservation of basins and micro-basins in the area.”

The impact is significant, she points out, because in the past families depended on the rains for their water supply and during the dry season and times of drought they had a very difficult time because they could not irrigate their crops or water their animals.

Denisse Chavez is gender officer at the Peruvian office of Diakonia, a Swedish organisation that promotes rights in vulnerable communities around the world. In Peru it partnered with the NGO Huñuc Mayu to revive ancestral knowledge of the Quechua communities of the Andean highlands and thus strengthen water security for local inhabitants. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Today, things have changed.

Churia, a village of just 25 families at more than 3,100 meters above sea level, in the district of Vinchos, is another community that has promoted solutions to address the water shortage problem.

Oliver Cconislla, 23, lives there with his wife Maximiliana Llacta and their four-year-old son. The family depends on small-scale farming and animal husbandry.

“Here we depend on the alpaca, using its meat to feed and nourish the children, making jerky (dried meat, ‘charki’ in Quechua) to store it, and when we have enough food we sell to the market. We spin the wool, weave it and sell it too,” he tells IPS over the phone.

His family has been able to count on grass and drinking water – absolutely vital to their livelihood – for their 50 alpacas and 15 sheep thanks to work by the organised community.

“We have been working to harvest water for three years,” he says. “We’ve built dikes, we’ve been separating off the ponds and planting queñua trees on the slopes of the hill. Last year I was a local authority and we worked hand in hand with Huñuc Mayu.”

Cconislla reports that they dammed six ponds using local materials such as grass, soil and clay – “only materials we found in the ground.” They also fenced off the queñua plantations.

“Now when there is no rain we are no longer sad or worried because we have the ponds. The dam keeps the water from running out, and when it fills up it spills over the banks, creating streams that run down to where the animals drink so they have permanent pasture; that area stays humid even during times of drought,” he says.

In addition to these ecosystem services, trout have been stocked in one of the ponds to provide food for families, especially children. “As a community we manage these resources so that they are maintained over time for the benefit of us and the children who will come,” he states.

Cristina Azpur, 46, has no animals, but she does have crops that need irrigation. She runs the household and the farm with the help of her two daughters, ages 11 and 13, when they are not in school, because she does not have a husband, “since it is better to be alone than in bad company,” she says, laughing.

For her and the other families living in houses scattered around the community of Chungui, the dam ensures that they have the water they need to grow their crops and raise their livestock, she says.

“I am about to plant potatoes, olluco (Ullucus tuberosus, a tuber whose leaves are also eaten), and oca (another tuber). This month of June we have had a small campaign (special planting of some crops between May and July), and we use water from the reservoir to ensure our food supply, which is the most important thing to stay healthy,” she says proudly.

She politely adds that she cannot continue talking because she must help her daughters, who study remotely through programmes broadcast on public television, due to the lockdown in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the neighbouring town of Oronccoy, home to some 60 families and founded in 2016, Natividad Ccoicca, 53, also grows her vegetables with water from a community-built reservoir.

She and her family, who live at an altitude of over 3,300 meters, have been part of an experience that has substantially improved their quality of life.

“It used to be very hard to fetch water,” she tells IPS. “We had to walk long distances and even take the horses to carry the containers that we filled at the springs. Now with the reservoir we have water for the farm, the animals and our own consumption.”

She also explains that because of the measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 there is greater demand for water in homes. “Can you imagine how things would be for us without the reservoir? We would have a higher risk of getting sick, that’s for sure,” she says.

Women and men work communally to install hoses and irrigate their crops using a sprinkler system, and also for human consumption, in Oronccoy, a village of 60 families in the Peruvian Andes highlands. CREDIT: Courtesy of Huñuc Mayu

These experiences of harvesting water are part of Huñuc Mayu’s integral proposal for the management of hydrographic basins using Andean techniques in synergy with low-cost conventional technologies to strengthen water security.

Medina highlights the involvement of the communities and the active participation of women, who in the Quechua worldview have a close link with water.

“We see important achievements by the communities themselves and the local people,” she says. “For example, the water supply has expanded in response to the demands of agricultural production and human consumption.”

Medina adds that “women have been active participants in protecting the sources of water and the work involved in raising livestock has been reduced to the benefit of their health. These are major contributions that improve the quality of life of families” in this historically neglected part of Peru.

Mexico is making progress on a project to modernise dams and other hydroelectric plant infrastructure and equipment, in order to increase generation, although this plan faces threats of drought and questions about profitability compared to other renewable sources. The photo shows the reservoir and dam at the Chicoasén power plant in Chiapas, included in the plan. Photo: Wikimedia

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Mar 30 2020 (IPS)

Water security and profitability are the Achilles heels of the plan to modernise 60 hydroelectric plants in Mexico, drawn up by the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Most of them are power plants built more than 50 years ago, so the upgrading plan poses technical and feasibility challenges. López Obrador has insisted on maintaining the hydropower plants, as they are part of Mexico’s heritage, under the control of the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).

Astrid Puentes, co-executive director of the non-governmental Interamerican Association for Environmental Defence (AIDA), believes the renovation plan makes sense because it avoids the damage caused by building new plants.

“Modernising and maintaining hydroelectric plants is a good idea. There are some plants that can withstand upgrading and will become more efficient in terms of water use and production,” the activist told IPS in the Mexican capital.

But she warned of the need for “good basic water planning” that takes into account climate factors, in order to assess whether it is worthwhile refurbishing some of the plants.

Data from the CFE obtained by IPS indicate that the public company has evaluated the expansion and profitability analysis of 21 dams, as part of the project aimed at rehabilitating or modernising hydropower plants.

Upgrading infrastructure and equipment would boost the generating power of 18 of these 21 plants.

The CFE analysed hydrometric data and produced a hydrological and hydro-energy study, an economic evaluation, and an analysis of profitability and social and environmental feasibility, in order to evaluate the situation of each plant.

Using these analyses, the CFE calculated the suggested megawatts (MW) and type of turbine to be installed, the result of the annual generation, the percentage obtained with the current conditions of the plants, the levelised cost of the electricity, the cost/benefit ratio of the plants and their profitability.

In this Latin American nation of 130 million people, there are some 4,900 public and private dams and reservoirs used for electricity, irrigation and fishing, among other uses, according to the government’s National Institute of Electricity and Clean Energy.

Of these, at least 101 generate electricity, with an average age of 47 years and an average capacity of 147 MW.

Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is continuing to build new hydroelectric plants, such as the one in Zapotillo, in the western state of Jalisco. In addition to the new plants, 60 older dams, included in a government modernisation plan, will produce more electricity. Photo: Courtesy of EJ Atlas

The CFE runs at least 84 of them, with a total power capacity exceeding 11,000 MW.

The CFE is considering expanding and modernising four plants with a capacity of between 10 and 72 MW and another 17 plants with a capacity ranging from less than one MW to 51 MW, while it is evaluating the profitability of nine large plants in the southern state of Chiapas and the western state of Michoacán.

It is also studying the relaunch of the Las Rosas power plant in the central state of Querétaro, which was built in 1949 and is completely inoperative.

In the view of Daniel Chacón, energy director of the non-governmental Mexican Climate Initiative, the refurbishing of hydropower plants is highly beneficial.

“It’s one of our pending tasks. You have to take into account that the reservoirs gradually fill up with sediment and shrink in size over the years. A selection should be made as to which dams are worth investing in, depending on their age and on how much their capacity has declined,” he told IPS.

Chacón pointed out that productivity depends on the rainfall regime, the end use of the water, and the level of sedimentation of the reservoir and how clogged up the pipes are.

In its 2020 budget, the CFE allocated at least 116 million dollars for the replacement of machinery and the rehabilitation of hydroelectric plants under its control.

In December 2018, when he began his six-year term, López Obrador announced an agreement with the Canadian public company Hydro-Québec to modernise 60 plants.

The effects of drought on the reservoirs

But Mexico’s hydroelectric system faces the threat of drought, one of the consequences of the climate crisis unleashed by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and to which Mexico is highly vulnerable, as the world’s 12th largest producer of hydrocarbons.

The 210 biggest reservoirs in the country can hold up to 84,500 cubic hectometres (hm3, millions of metres), compared to a maximum ordinary water level of 12,500 hm3, according to data from the government’s National Water Commission (Conagua).

Conagua’s latest report on the subject stated that on Mar. 16, five reservoirs were full to capacity, 76 were between 75 and 100 percent in volume, 68 were between 50 and 75 percent, and 22 were less than 50 percent. At least five of Mexico’s 32 states report critically low water levels in their reservoirs.

In February, Conagua transferred 100 million cubic metres of water from a dam in the northern state of Nuevo León to another reservoir in neighbouring Tamaulipas state because of the drought.

Several strips of Mexico’s Atlantic coast are suffering from severe and extreme drought, according to the National Drought Monitor.

Energy transition makes uneven progress

Despite the progress made in expanding the use of renewable energies, Mexico’s energy mix remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels. In the first quarter of 2019, gross generation totaled 80,225 gigawatt-hours (Gwh), up from 78,167 in the same period last year.

Gas-fired combined cycle plants produced 40,094, conventional thermoelectric plants 9,306 and carboelectric plants 6,265.

Hydroelectric plants accounted for 5,137 Gwh, wind farms 4,285, nuclear power plants 2,382 and solar stations 1,037. The greatest increase was in renewable sources.

Since the start of his term, López Obrador has opted to fortify the state monopolies of the CFE and the Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil company, thus favouring fossil fuels over renewables. And he has stated that he will not shut down power plants.

He cancelled the call for auctions of long-term contracts for electricity supply that allowed private companies to build wind and solar power plants and sell the energy to the CFE for 15 to 20 years.

But hydroelectricity cannot compete economically with wind and solar power, although it can serve as a back-up during peak consumption hours and reservoirs can serve as storage during critical periods.

The 2015 Energy Transition Law stipulates that clean energy must account for 25 percent of the electricity generated by 2018, 30 percent by 2021 and 35 percent by 2024. Counting hydropower and nuclear energy, the country has no problem reaching these goals.

With respect to the plan for modernising hydropower plants, Puentes and Chacón warned of the risk posed by drought.

“We should not depend on, or increase our dependence on, hydroelectric plants. The essential life span of these plants must be reassessed. We have not seen a plan to dismantle others either, which is what countries like the United States are doing. Dams that don’t generate electricity can serve as regulators and prevent floods and droughts,” Puentes said.

For his part, Chacón said that during times of drought, the water from the reservoirs goes to agricultural producers and cannot be used to generate electricity.

“We need to look at other renewable energies, like solar and wind. With more efficient turbines and generators, hydroelectric generation can become more efficient. The plants and reservoirs can be used for backup and energy storage. In Mexico that will become unavoidable at some point,” he said.

Prodesen, which is not considering shutting down plants, projects that Mexico will need 66,912 additional MW to meet electricity demand in the period 2018-2032, which implies an investment of 68 billion dollars over the next 15 years.

In that period, the additional hydroelectric capacity planned is three percent, or 2,213 MW. By 2022, hydropower is to represent 13 percent of the national total and in 2032, 11 percent.

In the Aztec worldview, Tlaloc was the god of rain and the one they worshipped to thank for rainfall. Perhaps their descendants will have to pray to him again to fill the reservoirs.

Juan Benítez, president of the Nuevos Horizontes Association of Joya de Talchiga, rests on the edge of the dike built as part of the El Calambre mini-hydroelectric dam. The 40 plus families in the village have had electricity since 2012, thanks to the project they built themselves, in the mountains of eastern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
Joya de Talchiga, EL SALVADOR, Oct 8 2018 (IPS)

In Lilian Gómez’s house, nestled in the mountains of eastern El Salvador, the darkness of the night was barely relieved by the faint, trembling flames of a pair of candles, just like in the houses of her neighbours. Until now.

Electricity arrived when they decided to build their own hydroelectric dam together, not only to light up the night, but also to take small steps towards undertakings that help improve living conditions in the village.

Now she uses a refrigerator to make “charamuscas” – ice cream made from natural beverages, which she sells to generate a small income.

“With the money from the charamuscas I pay for electricity, food and other things,” the 64-year-old Gómez, head of one of the 40 families benefiting from the El Calambre mini-hydroelectric plant project, told IPS.

This is a community initiative that supplies energy to La Joya de Talchiga, one of the 29 villages in the rural municipality of Perquín, with some 4,000 inhabitants, in the eastern department of Morazán, which borders to the north with Honduras.

During the 1980-1992 civil war, this region was the scene of fierce battles between the army and the then-guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), now a political party, in power since 2009 after winning two consecutive presidential elections.

When the war ended, the largest towns in the area were revived thanks to ecotourism and historical tourism, where visitors learn about battles and massacres in the area. But the most remote villages lack basic services, which keeps them from doing the same.

The El Calambre mini-hydroelectric power plant takes its name from the river with cold turquoise water that emerges in Honduras and winds through the mountains until it crosses the area where La Joya is located, dedicated to subsistence agriculture, especially corn and beans.

A small dike dams the water in a segment of the river, and part of the flow is directed through underground pipes to the engine house, 900 metres below, inside which a turbine makes a 58-kW generator roar.

La Joya is an example of how local inhabitants, mostly poor peasant farmers, didn’t stand idly by waiting for the company that distributes electricity in the area to bring them electric power.

The distribution of energy in this Central American country of 6.5 million people has been in the hands of several private companies since it was privatised in the late 1990s.

During the days IPS spent in La Joya, locals said they own the land where they live, but they lack formal documents, and without them the company that operates in the region doesn’t supply electricity. It only brought power to a couple of families who do have all their paperwork in order.

In this Central American nation, households with electricity represent 92 percent of the total in urban areas, but only 77 percent in rural areas, according to official data released in May.

Without much hope that the company would supply power, the residents of La Joya set out to obtain it by their own means and resources, with the technical and financial support of national and international organisations.

One of these was the association Basic Sanitation, Health Education and Alternative Energies (SABES El Salvador), which played a key role in bringing the initiative to La Joya, where it was initially met with reservations.

“People still doubted when they came to talk to us about the project in 2005, and even I doubted, it was hard for us to believe that it could happen. We knew how a dam works, the water that moves a turbine, but we didn’t know that it could be done on a small river,” Juan Benítez, president of Nuevos Horizontes, the community development organisation of La Joya, told IPS.

Carolina Martínez and her children stand in front of their house, lit inside by a light bulb, in the village of Joya de Talchiga in the eastern Salvadoran department of Morazán. The 36-year-old teacher is one of the beneficiaries of the community hydroelectric project, which since 2012 has provided electricity to more than 40 local families. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The small hydroelectric plant, in operation since 2012, was built by local residents in exchange for becoming beneficiaries of the service. Paid workers such as electricians and stonemasons were only hired for specialised work.

The total cost of the mini-dam was over 192,000 dollars, 34,000 of which were contributed by the community with the many hours of work that the local residents put in, which were assigned a monetary value.

The charge for the service is based on the number of light bulbs per family, at a cost of 50 cents a month each. Thus, if a family has four light bulbs, they pay two dollars a month, lower than what is charged commercially.

Local residents still remember how difficult life was when they had no hopes of getting electric power.

“When I was a girl, things were so hard without electricity, we had to buy candles or gas (kerosene) to light candles,” one of the beneficiaries, Leonila González, 45, told IPS as she rested on a chair in the hallway of her house, located in the middle of a pine forest, 30 metres from the river.

The small generator in the engine room built by the residents of Joya de Talchiga. Men from the village carried the heavy turbine that moves the 58-kW generator on their shoulders, since there is no access by vehicles where the mini-community dam was installed in the mountainous municipality of Parquín, in eastern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Most residents, she recalled, used to use “ocotes,” the local name for pieces of pine wood, whose resin is flammable.

“We would put two splinters in a pot, and that’s how we lived, with very dim light, but that’s how it was for us,” she said.

Meanwhile, Carolina Martinez, the teacher who works at the village preschool, pointed out that in those days the children’s homework was stained with charcoal soot from the ocote.

She and her family used to buy car batteries to run some appliances, which implied significant costs for them, including payment for the appliances and the person who brought them from nearby towns.

Others who needed to work with more powerful devices, such as saws for carpentry, had to buy gasoline-powered generators, she said. And those who had a cell phone had to send it to Rancho Quemado, a nearby village, for recharging.

“Now we see everything differently, the streets are illuminated at night, it’s no longer dark,” Martínez said.

For the village carpenters or welders, working is much easier with a power socket at hand.

A boy from La Joya, a village in eastern El Salvador, takes a charamusca, a fruit-based ice cream, from the refrigerator of Lilian Gómez, who, thanks to the arrival of electricity, has set up a small business making charamuscas, which are already popular among her neighbors. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

For María Isabel Benítez, 55, a homemaker, one of the advantages of having electricity is that you can watch the news and find out what’s going on in the country. “I like the 6:00 a.m. news programme, I see everything there,” she said, holding her little granddaughter Daniela in her arms.

Elena Gómez, a 29-year-old psychology student, said she can now do her homework on the computer at home. “I no longer have to go to the nearest cybercafé,” she said.

The project was considered binational from the outset, since the surplus energy generated in La Joya is distributed to the village of Cueva del Monte, four km away, in Honduras.

Additional power lines were installed so the plant can benefit another 45 families, 32 of whom are already connected.

“The Hondurans deceived us, they told us they were going to set into operation the energy project, but they didn’t, and we were only left with the blueprint,” Mauricio Gracia, the community leader of the Honduran village, told IPS.

The people of Cueva del Monte are Salvadorans who from one moment to the next found themselves living in Honduras, in September 1992, following a ruling by the International Court of Justice, which resolved a lingering border dispute that included the area north of Morazán.

Benitez, the president of the La Joya association, said the generator sometimes fails, especially when there are thunderstorms, so the organisation is looking for more support to purchase a second generator, which could operate when the first one turns off.

Also, as a community they hope to little by little generate development initiatives, with the electricity they already have, to give the local economy a boost.

For example, they have discussed the possibility of promoting rural tourism, taking advantage of the natural beauty of the area’s pine forest and the pools and waterfalls of the Calambre River.

The plan is to build mountain cabins, which would have electricity. But the idea has not come to fruition because it has not been possible to reach an agreement with the owners of the land, said Benítez.

Meanwhile, Lilian Gómez is happy that there is strong local demand for her charamuscas, which she could not make if electric power had not come to La Joya.

Access stairway to the Tocantins River in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins, which no longer has flowing water since it was dammed to generate electricity, mostly to be used in other parts of the country, and which contributes very little to local development. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
PALMAS and PORTO NACIONAL, Brazil, Jan 12 2018 (IPS)

Tocantins, the newest of Brazil’s 26 states, which was created in 1988 to seek its own paths to development in central Brazil, fell into the common plight of expanding borders, based on soy and hydroelectricity.

The area owes its name to a river that crosses the state from south to north, but which has been converted into a sequence of dams to generate electricity, almost entirely for other states. With no industries and with a population of just 1.5 million, consumption in this state is very limited.

“The lake is beautiful, but it left us without the tourism potential of the river and the electricity is more expensive for us than elsewhere,” complained journalist and writer Edivaldo Rodrigues, editor-in-chief of the newspaper O Paralelo 13, which he founded in 1987 in Porto Nacional.

The Lajeado hydroelectric power plant, with a capacity of 902.5 megawatts and which is officially named after former member of parliament Luis Eduardo Magalhães, who died in 1998, submerged beaches, crops and houses with its 630 square km reservoir, along a 170-km stretch of the Tocantins river.

“We had beaches in the dry season, islands of white sand that attracted many tourists”, and it was all lost when the water level rose, Rodrigues lamented, at his home in the city’s historical district, a few metres from the shore of the lake.

The journalist, who is the author of 12 books, chronicles, memoirs and novels, is a privileged witness to the transformations in Tocantins, especially in Porto Nacional, the cultural cradle of the state, with a population of about 53,000 people.

His historical novels show the violence of old landowners, the “colonels” appointed by the National Guard, a paramilitary militia that was disbanded in 1922, who dominated the region of Tocantins, as well as the advance in education brought by Dominican priests who came from France in 1886 to spread Catholicism from their base in Porto Nacional.

“They brought knowledge from Europe, they created schools, turning Porto Nacional into a cultural centre, and today a university town, with three universities and students from all over the country,” said the journalist who studied Communication and History in Goiania, capital of the neighboring state of Goiás.

Edivaldo Rodrigues, editor-in-chief of the newspaper O Paralelo 13, from Porto Nacional, a cultural and university centre in central Brazil with a population of 53,000 located on the right bank of the Tocantins River. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The river, which was part and parcel of the city, more than doubled in width when it became a lake, but now it is farther away from the population. Now there are ravines between the coastal avenue and where the water starts, accessed only through two stairways.

Some old families from the city were resettled away from the shore of the lake and indemnified, but most of the displaced were peasant farmers who lived on the other side, on the left bank, where the reservoir was extended the most across the plain.

Anesia Marques Fernandes, 59, is one of those victims.

“We lost the river, the beaches, the tourists, the nearby fish and the fertile lands which we sowed in the dry season,” recalled the peasant farmer, who was resettled along with her mother 21 km from the river in 2000, before the reservoir was filled the following year.

“My mother is the one who suffered the most and still suffers today, at 80 years of age,” after having raised her five children on her own in the flooded rural community, Carreira, because her husband died when she was pregnant with their fifth child, Fernandes said.

In the Flor de la Sierra Resettlement community, home to 49 displaced families, the four hectares of land that were given to them are not even a tenth of what they had before, she said. “But the houses are better,” she acknowledged.

The most important thing, however, was community life, the solidarity among “neighbours who helped each other, shared the meat of a butchered cow. We were one big family that was broken up,” she lamented. In the resettlement community there are only three families from her old village.

Bernardete Batista de Araujo stands in front of the house where she was relocated in Palmas, together with others displaced by the Lajeado hydroelectric dam in central Brazil. The high walls and a street muddy because of the rain make her miss Vila Canela, her old village on an island that no longer exists on the Tocantins River. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

That is the same complaint voiced by Maria do Socorro Araujo, a 56-year-old retired teacher, displaced from Canela, a submerged beach community, 10 km from Palmas, the capital of the state of Tocantins.

“The community was fragmented, it dispersed, it forgot its culture, its unity and its way of live,” said Araujo, who was resettled in 2001 on block 508 in the north of Palmas, with her husband and three children.

“We lost our land, tranquillity and freedom, there were no fences there; here we live behind high walls,” complained her neighbour Bernardete Batista de Araujo, referring to the house where she was resettled in the capital.

She is pleased, however, to have a roof over her head, a solid three-bedroom house, better than her rustic dwelling in Canela, which had been rebuilt after the river flooded and destroyed it in 1980.

In her small yard, she now tries to compensate for the loss of the many fruit trees in the village flooded by the reservoir, planting papaya, mango and pineapple.

“The bad thing here is the dust in the dry season and the mud when it rains because of the unpaved roads,” a long-standing complaint by the inhabitants of La Cuadra, who are demanding that the road be paved.

Palmas, with a current population of 290,000, is an artificial city, planned according to the model of Brasilia, with wide avenues and squares to accommodate large numbers of cars and blocks arranged by numbers and cardinal points.

Founded in 1989, it took years of construction before becoming in practice the administrative capital of Tocantins.

Antonio Alves de Oliveira, 63, is proud to have been “the third taxi driver” in Palmas, when the city, in its second year, “had nothing but dust and huge numbers of mosquitoes.”

“Fried fly” was the nickname given to an improvised restaurant, he recalled.

Where Palmas is located, the Tocantins River now has an 8.4-km bridge which crosses the reservoir – almost eight times the width before the construction of the Lajeado dam, 50 km downstream (to the north).

The environmental impact study carried out by Investco, the company that built the Lajeado hydropower plant between 1999 and 2001 and has a concession for 35 years, registered only 1,526 families, of which 997 are rural, directly affected by the dam and reservoir.

But Judite da Rocha, local coordinator of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), believes that the real number is close to 8,000 families.

Many groups were not recognised as affected, such as the Xerente indigenous people, boatmen, fishermen, potters, dredgers who extracted sand from the river and seasonal workers, such as “barraqueros” who set up stands to sell beach products in the tourist season, she argued.

But the “worst and most complex situation” is that of the Estreito hydroelectric plant, inaugurated in 2012 in the north of the state of Tocantins, with an installed capacity of 1,087 megawatts.

There are “almost 1,000 families displaced and without compensation”, scattered in seven camps, so that the total number of people affected could reach 12,000, according to Rocha.

MAB estimates that there are 25,000 families in total who suffer the consequences of the hydroelectric power plants built in the state of Tocantins, four of which are on the Tocantins River. Added to three other large plants built in other states, the Tocantins River has a generation capacity of 12,785 megawatts.

A boat navigates the Mekong, whose combined fisheries are valued at 17 billion dollars. Credit: Francisco Anzola/cc by 2.0

By Pascal Laureyn
PHNOM PENH, Nov 14 2017 (IPS)

In Laos, the lush forests are alive with the whines of drills that pierce the air. On the Mekong, a giant concrete wall rises slowly above the trees. The Don Sahong dam is a strong symbol, not only for a power-hungry Asia but also for what critics fear is a disaster in the making.

Landlocked Laos wants to become ‘the battery of Southeast Asia’. The mountainous country with swirling rapids has the ideal geography for hydropower production and Don Sahong is just one of nine dams that Laos wants to build on the mainstream Mekong, claiming that this is the only way to develop the poor country.Millions of people in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam could lose the fish they rely on for food.

But there are serious drawbacks. The Don Sahong dam is being built with little or no consideration of the impact on ecosystems and communities along the Mekong. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Mekong is the second most biodiverse river in the world, after the Amazon. It supports the world’s largest freshwater capture fishery. The Lower Mekong Basin provides a wide variety of breeding habitats for over 1,300 species of fish. But damming the Mekong will block fish migration towards these habitats.

The FAO calculated that about 85 percent of the Lower Mekong Basin’s population lives in rural areas. Their livelihoods and food security is closely linked to the river and is vulnerable to water-related shocks – not just for fishers but for thousands more who sell food products or provide hundreds of related services, says FAO. Millions of people in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam could lose the fish they rely on for food.

Chhith Sam Ath, the Cambodian director of the World Wide Fund (WWF), claimed in The Diplomat that the Don Sahong Dam is “an ecological time bomb”.

Millions of people in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam could lose the fish they rely on for food.
“It threatens the food security of 60 million people living in Mekong basin,” he said. “The dam will have disastrous impacts on the entire river ecosystem all the way to the delta in Vietnam.” This is particularly devastating for downstream Cambodia because more than 70 percent of the protein consumed there comes from fish.

The 260-megawatt dam can also endanger the Irrawaddy dolphins, which are an important source of ecotourism on the Cambodian side of the Mekong. There are only 80 dolphins left. Some live just a few miles from the Don Sahong dam site. WWF warns that damming the Mekong will soon drive all the remaining dolphins to extinction.

A battery worth 800 million dollars

Laos is going forward with the dam all the same, without approval from the Mekong River Commission and in defiance of protests from NGOs and downstream countries. Lao officials say that they cannot stop the country from pursuing its right to development. They argue that they will address some of the concerns with ‘fish-friendly turbines’ and fish ladders. But critics are not convinced that these measures are sufficient.

Downstream, Cambodia is making things much worse. On a Monday morning in September, Prime Minister Hun Sen pushed a symbolic button. For the first time the floodgates of Lower Sesan 2 Dam closed and an artificial lake started to fill. Cambodia now has its own 800-million-dollar battery, built with Chinese funds and knowhow.

In the opening ceremony, Hun Sen praised the technological miracle and the Chinese investors. He pointed out that the need for electricity is growing rapidly. Cambodia has the most expensive electricity in Southeast Asia. That will change with this 400-megawatt dam on the river Sesan, close to its confluence with the Mekong.

Drowning village

In Kbal Romeas, upstream the Sesan, fishermen waited in vain for the yearly migration in May and June. No more fish to catch. The villagers have moved elsewhere, escaping the rising water and increasing poverty. The only reminder of a once lively Kbal Romeas is the roof of a pagoda that seems to float on the empty water.

“The river Sesan is blocked by the dam,” Maureen Harris of NGO International Rivers writes in her report. “That’s a problem for the 200 species that migrate from the Mekong to their breeding grounds in the Sesan.”

The American National Academy of Sciences predicts that the fish population in the Lower Mekong Basin will decline by 9.3 percent. That’s just one dam. More dams are on the drawing table. The Mekong River Commission (MRC), the intergovernmental body charged with coordinating the river’s management, recently released provisional but alarming results of their research. The two finished dams and the 11 scheduled dams will decimate the fish population in the Lower Mekong Basin by half.

The dams would also affect roughly 20 million Vietnamese people in the Mekong Delta, an area that accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. Dams block the flow of sediments, rich with nutrients needed to make soil suitable for cultivation. In Vietnam eroded riverbanks and houses tumbling in the water have become a common spectacle.

The Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen dismissed these environmental concerns, criticising “radical environmentalists”.

“How else can we develop?” he said. “There is no development that doesn’t have an effect on the environment.”

The international NGO Mother Nature mapped the environmental consequences of the Lower Sesan 2 dam. Consequently, the Cambodian government revoked its license. One of the founders, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, has been banned from the country.

Costs outweigh benefits

The dams come at a high environmental cost, imperil food security and risk increasing poverty for millions of people. Moreover, the river’s potential is overestimated by dam developers, says the Mekong River Commission. Dams will meet just 8 percent of the Lower Mekong Basin’s projected power needs. The MRC proposes a ten-year moratorium on dam building. But few governments are listening.

The MRC valued the combined fisheries for the Mekong Basin at 17 billion dollars. Energy from the 13 dams may yield 33.4 billion, according to an international study by Mae Fa Luang University in Chiang Rai. But a denuded river system carries a price tag of 66.2 billion dollars, the same study predicts.

The real costs of hydropower seem to outweigh the benefits. But the projects still go ahead. The thump of jackhammers will become more common. The mother of all rivers will have to face an army of men with safety hats that want to stop her from flowing freely.

The Teles Pires river along the stretch between Sinop and Colider, two cities from which two new hydropower stations take their name, which are transforming the northern part of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a major energy generator and producer and exporter of soybean, maize and beef. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
ALTA FLORESTA, Brazil, Oct 16 2017 (IPS)

The dirty water is killing more and more fish and ‘Taricaya’ yellow-spotted river turtles every day. In addition, the river is not following its usual cycle, and the water level rises or declines without warning, regardless of the season, complained three Munduruku indigenous law students in the south of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.

The change in the natural flow of the Teles Pires river, caused by the installation of four hydropower plants, one in operation since 2015 and the others still under construction, is apparently reducing fish catches, which native people living in the lower stretch of the basin depend on as their main source of protein.

“When the water level rises, the fish swim into the ‘igapó’ and they are trapped when the level suddenly drops with unusual speed,” explained 26-year-old Aurinelson Kirixi. The “igapó” is a Brazilian term that refers to the forested, floodable shore of Amazon jungle rivers where aquatic animals seek food.

That includes the yellow-spotted river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), a species still abundant in the Brazilian Amazon, whose meat is “as important as fish for us,” the young Munduruku man told IPS during a tour of the indigenous territories affected by the hydroelectric plants.

“It’s even tastier than fish,” he agreed with his two fellow students. But “it is in danger of extinction; today we see them in smaller numbers and possibly our children will only see them in photos,” lamented Dorivan Kirixi, also 26.

“The fish die, as well as the turtles, because the water has gotten dirty from the works upstream,” said 27-year-old Isaac Waru, who could not study Administration because the degree is not offered in Alta Floresta, a city of 50,000 people in the north of the state of Mato Grosso, in west-central Brazil.

Local indigenous people avoid drinking water from the river, even bathing with it, after cases of diarrhea, itchy rashes and eye problems, said the three students who come from three different villages. To return to their homes they have to travel at least eight hours, half by road and the other half by river.

This year they began to study law thanks to scholarships paid by the São Manoel Hydroelectric Plant – also known as the Teles Pires Plant, which is the nearest to the indigenous lands – as part of the compensation measures for damage caused by the project.

They offered a total of seven scholarships for the three affected indigenous communities: the Apiaká, Kayabí and Munduruku, the latter of which is the largest indigenous group in the Tapajós river basin, formed by the confluence of the Teles Pires and Juruena rivers.

Three Munduruku indigenous students who study law in the city of Alta Floresta, in the southeast of the Brazilian Amazon region, thanks to scholarships from one of the companies building the hydroelectric plants on the Teles Pires river. They are highly critical of the impact of the new dams on their people. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The compensations for the indigenous communities were few in number and poorly carried out: “precariously built houses and health posts,” said Patxon Metuktire, local coordinator of the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the government body for the protection of indigenous peoples in Brazil.

“The companies believe that our problem is just one of logistics, that it is just a matter of providing trucks and fuel, and they forget that their projects damage the ecosystem that is the basis of our well-being and way of life,” he told IPS.

An oil spill further contaminated the river in November 2016. The hydroelectric plants denied any responsibility, but distributed mineral water to the indigenous villages, recalled Metuktire, whose last name is the name of his ethnic group, a subgroup of the Kayapó people.

Fisherpersons are another group directly affected by the drastic modification of the course of the river by the hydropower dams, because their lives depend on flowing water.

Since the vegetation in the river began to die off after the river was diverted to build the dam, fish catches have shrunk, said Solange Arrolho, a professor of biology at the State University of Mato Grosso in Alta Floresta, where she is head of the Ichthyology Laboratory of the Southern Amazon.

A map of the Teles Pires river, a source of hydroelectric energy in Mato Grosso, in the southeast of the Brazilian Amazon region. In red is the location of hydroelectric power plants that have damaged the way of life of indigenous people and riverbank communities that depend on fishing. Credit: Courtesy of Instituto Ciencia e Vida

The researcher, who said she has been “studying fish for 30” of her 50 years, led a project to monitor fish populations in 2014 in the area of influence of the Colider hydroelectric power station, as part of the Basic Environmental Program that the company that built and will operate the dam must carry out.

Colider, which will start operating in mid-2018, is the smallest of the four plants that are being built on a 450-km stretch in the middle course of the river, with a capacity of 300 MW and a 183-sq-km reservoir.

The others are the Teles Pires and São Manoel plants, downstream, and Sinop, upstream. The entire complex will add 3,228 megawatts of power and 746 square kilometers of reservoirs.

These works affect fishing by altering the river banks and the river flow, reducing migration of fish, and cutting down riverbank forests, which feed fish with fruit and insects that “fall from the trees into the water,” said Arrolho . “The fish do not adapt, they migrate,” he told IPS.

The Teles Pires river is suffering from the accumulated effects of polluting activities, such as soy monoculture, with intensive use of agrochemicals, livestock farming and mining, he pointed out.

The Colider and Sinop plants do not directly affect indigenous lands such as those located downstream, but they do affect fisherpersons.

“They killed many fish with their explosions and digging,” said Julita Burko Duleba, president of the Sinop Colony of Fisherpersons and Region (Z-16), based in the city of Sinop, the capital city of northern Mato Grosso.

“Fish catches in the Teles Pires basin have dropped: we used to catch over 200 kilos per week, but now we catch a maximum of 120 kilos and on average only between 30 and 40 kilos,” she said.

At the age of 68, she now does administrative work. But she was a fisherwoman for more than two decades, and her husband still works as a fisherman, the activity that allowed them, like other colleagues, to live well and buy a house.

Deforestation due to the expansion of cattle ranches dominates the landscape in the vicinity of Alta Floresta, the city that is a southeastern gate to the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, and is also known as a center for ecotourism based on fishing and bird-watching. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

They are currently struggling to obtain better conditions for the sector, such as a warehouse and a refrigerated truck that would allow them to ”collect” the fish from the widely spread members and sell them in the market.

One difficulty facing this colony is the dispersion of its members throughout 32 municipalities. The association at one point had 723 members, but now there are only 290, mainlyin the cities of Colider and Sinop, from which the nearby hydroelectric plants take their names.

Many have retired, others have given up. “We are an endangered species,” Duleba lamented to IPS.

The compensations offered by the hydroelectric companies for the damage caused do not include a focus on helping small-scale fisherpersons recover their livelihoods, as Duleba and other activists had hoped.

The headquarters of the Colony, which will be built by the Sinop Power Company, owner of the power plant of the same name, will be more of a tourist complex, with a restaurant, lookout, swimming pools and soccer field, on the river bank, 23 km from the city .

There will be a berth and an ice factory which could be useful for fishing, but not the fishing village, with its houses and infrastructure, which Duleba tried to negotiate.

In Colider, fisherpersons preferred compensation in cash, instead of collective projects, she lamented.

Northern Mato Grosso, where the land is the current source of local incomes and wealth, which is now based in agriculture, livestock farming and mining, after being based on timber, has now discovered the value of its water resources.

But its energy use is imposed to the detriment of traditional users, just as the land was concentrated in export monoculture to the detriment of food production.

A boat under repair on the shore of the Sobradinho reservoir, which has a low water level due to the five years of drought which has plagued the semi arid interior of Northeastern Brazil. Bushes submerged by the dammed-up waters of the São Francisco river since the 1970s can be glimpsed. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
SENTO SE, Brazil, Jan 29 2017 (IPS)

“Now we have internet and TV. Before, we didn’t even have electricity, but it was better,” said Lourival de Barros, one of the people displaced by the hydropower plants which have mushroomed aorund Brazil, mainly since the 1970s.

Barros was evicted from his home in Sento Sé towards the end of 1976. The town of 7,000 people was submerged under the waters of the Sobradinho reservoir just over a year later.

Three other towns, Casa Nova, Pilão Arcado and Remanso, also disappeared under water, along with dozens of riverside villages, in the state of Bahía in Northeastern Brazil.

In total, 72,000 people were displaced, according to social organisations, or 59,265 according to the company responsible for the project, the São Francisco Hydroelectric Company (CHESF).

The sacrifice was made for the sake of the country’s energy requirements and for the development of what was described by government leaders of the time, during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, as an “irrelevant” region, marked by widespread illiteracy, a “subsistence economy,” and “primitive,” isolated people afraid of change.

To relocate the population of Santo Sé, a new city with the same name was built, with better houses, including indoor bathrooms and services such as electricity and sewage. But “we lost much more”, said Barros, a 70-year-old retired fisherman and small farmer with eight children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

“We had many fish in the river. In the reservoir at first we could fish 100 kg a day, but the fish declinednin the last 10 to 15 years, and now it’s hard to catch even 10 kg, just enough to feed the family,” he told IPS.

“There were 2,000 fishers and it was the livelihood of all of us. Today, there are at best 50 who are able to live off fishing,” even though 9,000 are registered in the trade association, many of them just to receive the unemployment payments during the spawning period when fishing is banned, he said. “They need it,” he added.

Barros laments that the fish native to the area have disappeared, while other Amazon species were introduced in the artificial lake, including one, the pavón (Cichla ocellaris), which eats all the others.

Retired fisherman and farmer 70-year-old Lourival de Barros, in his house in the town of Sento Sé, which he received as compensation for the loss of his nice house and other property in the old town, which was submerged by the Sobradinho dam four decades ago, whichburied a lifestyle that he still misses. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

He also complains that his family used to have five plots of land where they grew crops and he owned a mill to make manioc flour, for which they did not receive any compensation. “We lost everything,” he said.

Many flooded properties or assets have still not been compensated, said Adzamara Amaral, author of the book “Memories of a submerged city,” written in 2012 as the thesis for her journalism degree at the University of the State of Bahía.

Her own family is still fighting in court for compensation for 15,000 hectares registered as property of her grandfather, which was in her family for three centuries and included three houses and fruit orchards.

The new town built for the relocated population was deprived of its “riverine” spirit, as in the case of other “rebuilt” towns.

Also lost, besides the fish, was the traditional riverbank farming during the dry season, when water levels were down and crops were planted next to the river on the nutrient-rich soil replenished each year by the seasonal floods.

Large harvests of corn and beans were planted between April and October. “That is why the São Francisco river is known as the ‘Brazilian Nile,’ Amaral told IPS.

With the dam, the water flooded rocky areas or parts of the Caatinga – the semi-arid ecosystem exclusive to the Northeast – and modified the annual changes in the low and high water levels in the river, putting an end to dry season farming.

Relocation to the new Sento Sé, population 41,000 today, accentuated the isolation of the local inhabitants, among other reasons because the distance doubled with respect to Juazeiro, a city of 220,000 people, which is the economic and educational hub of the northern part of Bahía.

Gildalio da Gama (L), municipal secretary of environment up to December, and boat repairman João Reis on the banks of the resevoir in Sento Sé, where the inhabitants of the old town were resettled with almost no compensation, displaced by the Sobradinho hydropower plant on the São Francisco river in Northeastern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Now the town is 196 km away, 50 of which are along a dirt road filled with potholes that makes transportation difficult. That is the reason the irrigation agriculture company Fruitmag which employed 1,800 workers, pulled out of Sento Sé, arguing that the jolting of the trucks damaged the grapes.

“Paving the road is key to the development of the municipality, as is offering technical and university courses, which would prevent the exodus of young people, which has been reducing the local population in recent years,” said Amaral.

The new location of the town on the banks of the lake was meant to keep it near the shore even during the dry season, she said. But many people believe that the then mayor decided on the location so it would be near his farm.

Now, the shore of the Sobradinho reservoir has retreated some 600 metres from Santo Sé, after five years of drought.

“There are places where the water ebbs up to 10 km, like in Quixaba, a nearby town,” said João Reis, a 65-year-old metal worker from São Paulo, who worked for years in CHESF.

He has lived for 33 years in Sento Sé, his parents’ hometown, and he currently repairs boats in the São Francisco river. He says that with its fertile lands and marble and precious stone deposits, the municipality has “a great potential to prosper.”

One of eight wind farms built near Sento Sé due to the strong winds on the plateaus surrounding the town in Northeast Brazil, whose population was paradoxically displaced in the 1970s to build the biggest hydropower plant in the region. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

To overcome its isolation, his colleague Djalma Vitorino, a boat specialist, proposes setting up a ferry service between Sento Sé and Remanso, another relocated town, on the other side of the reservoir. About 25 km or “an hour and a half of navigation” separate the two towns.

“They have a good hospital there where we can take our sick people,” as an alternative to Juazeiro, which is more than three hours away by road, Vitorino told IPS.

Built between 1973 and 1979 on the São Francisco river, the Sobradinho hydropower plant has the capacity to generate 1,050 MW, thanks to its reservoir of 34,000 cubic metres that covers 4,214 square km, the biggest in surface area and the third in water volume in Brazil.

In addition to the generation of electric power, accumulating so much water also gives it the functions of regulating the flow, optimising the operation of seven hydropower plants built downstream, and supplying water for the irrigation of crops in the surrounding area.

Its social impacts stood out because a highly populated area was flooded, in the 1970s, when the country was governed by an authoritarian military regime and environmental legislation was just starting to be developed. Moreover, social movements were weak or nonexistent.

To flood that much land, Sobradinho required the expropriation of 26,000 properties.

CHESF shelled out very low sums in the few cases of compensation it paid, mostly because “the local people did not have official title deeds or did not know how much their property was worth,” said 47-year-old Gildalio da Gama, who until December was secretary of environment in Sento Sé.

“Any money was a lot for people who always handled little money,” da Gama, who is now a primary school teacher on an island where his parents live, 150 km from the town, told IPS:

His grandfather was not compensated for his land because CHESF did not recognise the submitted documentation, he said.

New hydropower plants, such as Itaparica, inaugurated in 1988, downstream on the São Francisco river, meet the regulations, because of the pressure of environmentalists and social organisations. But forced displacement continues, generating noisier conflicts than in the past.

Protests have grown even more against hydropower plants in the Amazon rainforest, particularly the one in Belo Monte, a huge power plant with a capacity of 11,233 MW, inaugurated on May 2016.

Students from the school in Vila Nova Teotônio, that now has half the students it used to have, wait for the bus that takes them to their nearby homes, or – in the case of those who live on the other side of the Madeira River – for the boat that crosses the Santo Antônio dam in the municipality of Porto Velho, in northwestern Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
PORTO VELHO, Brazil, Oct 10 2016 (IPS)

The construction of mega-hydropower plants in Brazil has been a tragedy for thousands of families that have been displaced, and a nightmare for the companies that have to relocate them as required by local law.

But the phenomenon is not exclusive to this country. According to a 2005 study by Thayer Scudder, who teaches anthropology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), of 44 dams worldwide whose outcomes were assessed by the report, a majority of the resettled population was further impoverished in 36 of the cases.

In fact, just three of the plants helped to improve people’s lives. In the other five cases, people managed to maintain their previous standard of living.

Of the 50 power plants that were studied, 19 were in Asia, 10 in Latin America, and the rest in other regions. (In six cases, insufficient data was available to evaluate outcomes.)

Two giant hydroelectric power plants recently built on the Madeira River where it crosses the city of Porto Velho in the’ Amazon rainforest in northwest Brazil are adding to the negative data, in spite of the efforts made, investing millions in resettling people.

Six years after their displacement due to the construction of the Jirau and Santo Antônio plants, the third and fourth largest dams in the country, respectively, the resettled families still depend on support from the companies that built the dams, and a small portion have given up their new homes.

The school in Vila Nova Teotônio has only half of the nearly 300 students that it had in its previous site, and the number “is going down every year,” despite the more modern and spacious facilities, Vice Principal Aparecida Veiga told IPS.

The population of the fishing village that emerged seven decades ago next to the Teotônio waterfall dwindled together with the student body, after the families were resettled to a higher spot safe from the flooding from the Santo Antônio dam, built from 2008 to 2012, six kilometres from the city of Porto Velho, the capital of the municipality and of the state of Rondônia.

“We have classrooms with five students in the morning, in contrast with the up to 42 students we used to have in the old school, with teachers that are needed in other schools being underutilised,” said Veiga.

“Down below,” as they refer to the submerged village, “the community was very connected with the school, which strengthened education. Here, we are having problems with drugs, pregnant girls. They were removed from their roots, their culture,” she said.

Empty houses in Vila Nova Teotônio, where 47 families remain, according to the company that built the Santo Antônio hydropower plant, which also constructed a community of 72 houses, 17 of which were transferred to the settlers’ associations for the school, health centres and other services. Some of the families that were resettled in this town in the northwestern Brazilian state of Rondônia have already left. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

One loss was the waterfall, which was submerged by the dam.

With the perspective of a businessman, Carlos Alfonso Damasceno, a 48-year-old father of six, says “it is not a question of whether or not people like the new village; it’s about a lack of income sources.”

“There are no fish, the river has dried and silted up…Also, the road was extended 11 km, having been rebuilt to go around a jutting out part of the reservoir, and that keeps tourists away.”

With fish scarce and access more difficult, besides the mosquitoes that proliferate in the stagnant water, Teotônio no longer attracts the visitors that used to come to enjoy the local food, beaches and waterfall, said Damasceno, who owns the village’s largest store and restaurant.

He believes that rebuilding the old road, by filling in with earth the submerged section, would be enough to overcome the local economic decline, returning to an acceptable distance of 30 km between the village and Porto Velho, a market of 510,000 people.

Only 48 families from the original village of Teotônio accepted resettlement on the new site, and “just 18 families remain, but some of them were not among the initial families,” said Damasceno.

But the Santo Antônio Energía Consortium (SAE), which built the plant and holds a concession to operate it for 35 years, provides different statistics. There are 47 families now living in Vila Nova Teotônio, the company informed IPS, and of the 72 houses that were built, 17 were transferred to the Settlers’ Association and other institutions.

Carlos Damasceno in his store, which provides gas, food and other goods to the people of Vila Nova Teotônio. The town was built with 72 houses to resettle the villagers who lived along the Madeira River, in communities that were flooded by the Santo Antônio hydropower plant reservoir, in the northwest of Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“Less than five families sold their homes,” said the consortium, which describes the village as a “model case”, with a tourism potential which is reflected in the events held there, and facilities built by SAE, such as an artificial beach, a wooden pier, an eco-trail, and lodging houses.

Fish farming of the tambaqui (Piaractus macropomus) – also known as black pacu, black-finned pacu, giant pacu, or cachama – the most profitable Amazon fish for breeding, has not yet taken off because the group of settlers chosen for the activity has rejected the offered project, with training, materials, tanks and necessary vehicles, said SAE.

Each family in Teotônio is still receiving a monthly allowance of 1,250 Brazilian reals (380 dollars) from the company, set by the environmental agencies, since the families are not yet able to support themselves, after six years in their new concrete homes built on 2,000-square-metre lots and equipped with sewage, running water and other basic services.

Similar difficulties in adaptation in have been experienced in the other six resettled villages built by SAE and the two by Sustainable Energy of Brazil (ESBR), which constructed and operates the Jirau hydropower plant, 120 km from Porto Velho.

View of Nova Mutum Paraná, a development of 1,600 houses built in a deforested area far from the Madeira River, where people displaced by the Jirau hydropower plant have been resettled. The settlement has brought culture shock to the riverine population that is deeply connected with the river and the forest. Credit: Courtesy of ESBR

In the New Life Rural Resettlement built by ESBR, only 22 of the initial 35 families remain. Late this year they are to start breeding tambaqui in tanks dug below ground, whose wastewater will be used to fertilise vegetable gardens and fruit orchards, following the pilot project carried out for the last six years.

ESBR has also resettled some of the people displaced by the dam in Nova Mutum, an urban development of 1,600 houses built mainly to accommodate its employees.

In this landscape of tree-less grasslands and cattle pasture, the company tried to resettle hundreds of families from the old Mutum Paraná, a village of riverine people in close connection with the forest, which was flooded by the Jirau dam.

Far from the river and its fish, the forest and its fruit, with concrete homes instead of their wooden houses, and a pool instead of their traditional river beach, the resettled people suffered from culture shock and found it hard to adapt.

Some of the families left, trying to reconstruct on their own their previous way of life, in Vila Jirau, a small riverside community.

But Nova Mutum is one of the few success stories among forced resettlements, according to Berenice Simão, co-author of the paper “Socioecological Resilience in Communities Displaced by Hydroelectric Plants in the Amazon Region“, together with ecologist Simone Athayde, from the University of Florida, United States.

The small community of resettled people is “organised, and has very active associations of local residents and women,” which are persistent in their negotiations, fighting and not giving up on their demands,” Simão told IPS.

The presence of a large number of shopkeepers and civil servants among the resettled people contributes to its success. Moreover, Nova Mutum is the ESBR’s showcase, and the company seems intent on investing whatever is necessary to develop the community, she said.

The company created the Environmental Observatory of Jirau, a social organisation with community participation that promotes environmental education, through gardens and reforestation, and cooperativism among farmers.

A furniture factory is being set up in the town, in a warehouse that has been empty since the dam was finished. “This could be the start of an industrial hub” – which was included in ESBR’s plans but never emerged – generating jobs and boosting the development of the community, said Simão.

Part of the rural municipality of Chicoasén to be flooded by the second dam built in that area, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. A large part of the local peasant farmers are fighting the new hydropower plant, pointing to the damages they say were caused by the Chicoasén 1 dam, built 40 years ago. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
CHICOASÉN, Mexico , Mar 8 2016 (IPS)

In 1976, the construction of a hydroelectric dam destroyed farmland in the rural municipality of Chicoasén in southern Mexico. Forty years later, part of the local population is fighting a second dam, which would deprive them of more land.

“They destroyed everything,” Antonio Herrera, one local resident of this municipality in the state of Chiapas, told IPS. “The land is useless now, it’s impossible to farm it. The dam has affected our lives a great deal.”

Herrera complained that local peasant farmers have been unable to reach their land since Mexico’s state-owned power utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) granted a contract in January 2015 for the construction of the Chicoasén 2 dam on the Grijalva River. The project includes a plan to expropriate part of the ejido – formerly public land held in common by the inhabitants of a village and farmed cooperatively or individually.“We don’t have any information about the hydropower dam. We don’t know what will happen to the people who live along the riverbanks. The CFE says it has permission from the ejidatarios, but we haven’t given them permission. They are basing their arguments on a false (community) assembly, which has signatures from owners who are already dead.” -- Claudia Solís

A huge mechanical shovel digs up sand and gravel while Herrera, a member of the Chicoasén ejido committee, points to the work site in the distance, where the formerly green land is coated by brown.

The 240-MW dam, to be built at a cost of 300 million dollars, is scheduled to come onstream in July 2018.

IPS saw the environmental impact study that the CFE presented to the environment ministry. It states that the total surface area amounts to 234 hectares, 188 of which will be covered by the reservoir, located some 850 km south of Mexico City in this municipality of 5,159 people, the traditional territory of the Nahoa and Zoque indigenous peoples.

The CFE awarded the contract for the construction of the dam to a consortium of three Mexican companies and the Costa Rica-based subsidiary of the Chinese firm Sinohydro. The utility has already expropriated 69 hectares of land for the new dam. The owners of the land were paid 2,300 dollars per hectare.

In 1951, the government granted the local residents 3,400 hectares to create the ejido, which doubled in size in 1986 when they were given another 3,461 hectares. The land is owned by 460 ‘ejidatarios’ or members of the ejido, around 50 of whom have since died and passed on their land to their wives or children.

The first Chicoasén dam, 100 km from the second, expropriated land from the original ejido grant, and the second will take part of the land awarded in 1986.

When the CFE built the 2,400-MW Manuel Moreno Torres dam, better known as Chicoasén 1, in 1976, the company promised to pay for the land and provide piped water, a school and a health clinic.

But these promises were not fulfilled, the ejidatarios complain.

And now they are afraid history will repeat itself.

“We don’t have information about the hydropower dam,” Claudia Solís, the daughter of one of the ejidatarios, told IPS. “We don’t know what will happen to the people who live along the riverbanks. The CFE says it has permission from the ejidatarios, but we haven’t given them permission. They are basing their arguments on a false (community) assembly, which has signatures from owners who are already dead.”

Mainly elderly peasant farmers in Chicoasén, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, who have land in an “ejido” – formerly public land that was granted to communities to farm individually or cooperatively – take part in a protest against the installation of a second hydroelectric dam in the area, which will affect their farms and their way of life. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

To block construction of the new dam, local residents have held demonstrations, community elders have gone on hunger strike, and legal action has been taken.

But the ejidatarios are divided, because one group supports the new dam.

The opponents are a majority in the community and are led by a group of elders who are dedicating their last remaining energy to defending their land and their way of life, taking to the streets with their canes, their straw ‘sombreros’ and their families.

In December 2014, 62 ejidatarios brought individual lawsuits, which were admitted by a federal judge in October 2015. And in March 2015 they filed a collective lawsuit, which was accepted by another federal judge in May 2015.

But work on the dam has not been brought to a halt.

The local population grows crops like maize, pumpkin, beans, watermelon and melon, fishes in the water of the reservoir and caters to tourists who visit the area.

Chiapas, a supplier of energy

Several large-scale energy projects have been built or are planned by the government or companies in the impoverished state of Chiapas.

Four dams already operating in the state represent 45 percent of the country’s hydroelectricity. Three others also produce energy in what is Mexico’s main river basin.

Construction of the dams has left its mark on local communities and has modified the natural water regimes, led to the loss of vegetation, displaced wildlife and destroyed their habitats, environmentalists and ejidatarios told IPS during the last protest held against the dam and a visit to the affected area.

In Mexico, 13 large hydroelectric dams generate more than 10,000 MW a year, of the total 65,000 MW produced in the country. There is only one new hydropower project in the 2015-2029 National Electric System Development Programme (PRODESEN), launched in July 2015: Chicoasén 2.

The Chicoasén 2 environmental impact study says the dam will directly affect five communities in the municipality and will indirectly affect another 10. It also acknowledges that the dam, the reservoir and the hypdropower plant will hurt the landscape, wildlife and surface drainage.

“We don’t want the dam,” said Herrera, whose family includes four other ejidatarios. “The CFE doesn’t listen to us, it doesn’t take us into account.”

In 2013, the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change rejected the inclusion of Chicoasén 2 as a carbon offsetting project, under the argument that there was no clear demonstration of the emissions reduction, which the government estimated at 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

Besides the key role it plays in the generation of hydropower, since the 1970s Chiapas has become increasingly important in terms of oil production, and both the state-owned oil giant Pemex and the energy ministry included new fields in the state to be explored or put to tender, in their plans in 2015.

Twenty oilfields are operating in Chiapas, with a total of 278 million barrels of oil in reserves, and an impact on 38 Zoque communities in six municipalities.

And the 2015-2019 Five-Year Plan for the Expansion of the System for the Transportation and Storage of Natural Gas includes the projected 440-km Salina Cruz-Tapachula gas pipeline between the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to be completed in 2018, but not yet put out to tender.

A survey carried out in the state by the energy ministry on the impact of oil industry operations on other economic activities found that it hurt agriculture, tourism and archaeological sites, as well as nine large environmental areas.

“Exploration for oil has an impact on forests, water resources, and indigenous communities,” Fabio Barbosa, a professor in the economy department of the Autonomous National University of Mexico, told IPS. “The conflicts that already exist will be aggravated, but oil companies aren’t stopped by social conflicts.”

Barbosa said oil industry plans are unsustainable. “If an important well is developed, environmental disasters created in other states can be repeated,” he warned.

Mexico’s law on fossil fuels, in effect since August 2014 as part of the reform that opened up the oil and power industries to private capital, stipulates that the energy ministry must hold non-coercive negotiations to obtain free, prior and informed consent from indigenous communities when energy projects are to be carried out in their territories.

In addition, companies must present a social impact assessment in order to obtain a permit for their projects.

But these requisites have not been enforced in Chiapas, according to local residents and social and environmental activists.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Altamira water treatment plant is practically inactive because the sewer pipes installed 10 months ago in this city of 140,000 people have not been connected to the homes and businesses. Altamira is 50 km from the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in Brazil’s Amazon jungle region. Credit. Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ALTAMIRA, Brazil, Aug 31 2015 (IPS)

In the case of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in Brazil, the projects aimed at mitigating the social impacts have been delayed. But in other cases, infrastructure such as hospitals and water and sewage pipes could improve the image of the hydropower plants on Brazil’s Amazon rainforest rivers, turning them into a factor of effective local development.

Under construction since 2011 on the Xingú river, Belo Monte has dedicated an unprecedented amount of funds to compensating for the impacts of the dam, through its Basic Environmental Project (PBA), which has a budget of 900 million dollars at the current exchange rate.

To that is added a novel 140-million-dollar Sustainable Regional Development Plan (PDRS), aimed at driving public policies and improving the lives of the population of the dam’s area of influence, made up of 11 municipalities in the northern state of Pará.

These funds amount to 12.8 percent of the cost of the giant dam on the middle stretch of the Xingú river, one of the Amazon river’s major tributaries. If distributed per person, each one of the slightly more than 400,000 inhabitants of these 11 municipalities would receive 2,500 dollars.

But the funds invested by the company building the Belo Monte hydropower plant, Norte Energía, have not silenced the complaints and protests which, although they have come from small groups, undermine the claim that hydropower dams are the best energy solution for this electricity-hungry country.

“The slow pace at which the company carries out its compensatory actions is inverse to the speed at which it is building the hydropower plant,” complained the Altamira Defence Forum, an umbrella group of 22 organisations opposed to the dam.

The most visible delay has involved sanitation works in Altamira, the main city in the area surrounding the dam, home to one-third of the local population. Installed 10 months ago, the sewage and water pipes are not yet functioning, leaving the water and wastewater treatment plants partially idle.

The problem is that the pipes were not connected to the local homes and businesses, a task that has been caught up in stalled negotiations between Norte Energía, the city government and the Pará sanitation company, even after the company expressed a willingness to shoulder the costs.

“In addition, the storm drainage system was left out of the plans; the city government didn’t include it in the requirements and conditions set for the company,” the head of the Live, Produce and Preserve Foundation, João Batista Pereira, told IPS.

Part of one of the 18 big turbines that will generate electricity in the main Belo Monte plant, ready to be inserted into one of the big circular metal holes built in the giant dam in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The lack of storm drains is especially destructive for cities in the Amazon rainforest, where torrential rains are frequent.

The works and services included in the PBA respond to requirements of the Brazilian Environment Institute, the national environmental authority. Incompliance with these requisites could supposedly bring work on the dam to a halt. But the rules are subject to flexible interpretations, as recent experience has shown.

Pereira is one of the leaders of the PDRS, a “democratic and participative” programme where decisions on investments are reached by an administrative committee made up of 15 members of society and 15 representatives of the municipal, state and national governments.

The projects can be proposed by any local organisation that operates in the four areas covered by the plan: land tenure regularisation and environmental affairs, infrastructure, sustainable production, and social inclusion.

In these areas and some projects that the company finances, such as the Cacauway chocolate factory that processes the growing local production of cacao, the PDRS is distinct from the PBA, which addresses the immediate needs of people affected by the dam, such as indigenous people, fisherpersons or families displaced by the reservoirs.

The PBA’s activities were defined by the environmental impact study produced by researchers prior to the dam concession tender. Hospitals and clinics were built or refurbished to compensate the municipalities for the rise in demand for health services, while 4,100 housing units were built for relocated families.

These are responses to the immediate needs of affected individuals, groups or institutions, without integral or lasting planning. The only one responsible for implementation is the company holding the concession, even though they involve tasks that pertain to the public sector.

“The confusion between public and private is natural,” José Anchieta, the director of socioenvironmental affairs in Norte Energía, told IPS.

The delay in compensatory programmes generated chaos, the Altamira Defence Forum complains. Many of the initiatives were supposed to be carried out prior to construction of the hydropower plant.

The hospitals and health clinics were not delivered by Norte Energía until now, when construction of the dam is winding down. But they were most needed two years ago, when the floating migrant worker population in the region peaked as a result of work on the dam. The same is true for schools and urban development works.

This mistiming led to serious problems for the local indigenous population. The institutions protecting this segment of the population were not strengthened. On the contrary, the local presence of the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the government agency in charge of indigenous affairs, was weakened during the construction of the dam, and the overall absence of the state was accentuated.

From 2010 to 2012 an “emergency plan” distributed processed foods and other goods to indigenous villages. This led to an abrupt change in habits, driving up child malnutrition and infant mortality among indigenous communities, which only recently began to be provided with housing, schools and equipment and inputs to enable them to return to agricultural production.

Bridge under construction on a road at the entrance to the city of Altamira, in Brazil’s Amazon region. The delay in building the bridge has hindered the reurbanisation of the low-lying parts of the city that will be partially flooded when the Belo Monte dam reservoir is filled. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The PBA and PDRS also have different timeframes. The former is to end before the reservoirs are filled, which is to be completed by the end of this year. The latter, meanwhile, involves a 20-year action plan.

The company’s social programmes are also “an important sphere of debate, definition of projects and redefinition of public policies, which should become permanent by being transformed into an institute or foundation,” said Pereira, defending “the adoption of their democratic administration by other development agencies.”

The question is of concern to Brazil’s National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES), which has financed 78 percent of the cost of the construction of Belo Monte.

Besides providing a team to accompany the PDRS, it promoted a study to organise its projects and ideas in an “initiatives file” and a Territorial Development Agenda (TDA) in the Xingú basin.

But this planning and promotion effort to bring about real development has come late, when it is difficult to neutralise the negative effects, which will stand in the way of the construction of new hydropower dams in the Amazon, even with the promise of a TDA.

Belo Monte has also highlighted the dilemmas and challenges of power generation, currently dramatised by severe drought in much of Brazil.

Belo Monte, which will be the second-largest hydropower plant in Brazil and the third-largest in the world, producing 11,233 MW, will aggravate the seasonal drop in hydropower in the second half of each year, once it becomes fully operational in 2019.

That is because the Xingú has the biggest seasonal variation in flow. From 19,816 cubic metres per second in April, the month with the strongest flow, it plummets to 1,065 cubic metres in September, the height of the dry season. This was the average between 1931 and 2003, according to the state-run Eletrobras, Latin America’s biggest power utility company.

There is probably no worse choice of river for building a run-of-the-river power station, whose reservoirs do not accumulate water for the dry months. Belo Monte will represent 12 percent of the country’s total hydropower generation, which means the effect of the plunge in electricity will be enormous, fuelling demand for energy from the dirtier and most costly thermal plants.

One alternative would have been a reservoir 2.5 times bigger, which would have flooded two indigenous territories – something that is banned by the constitution.

Another would have been the construction of four to six dams upstream, to regularise the water flow in the river, as projected by the original plan in the 1980s which was ruled out due to the outcry against it.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez

A street in the Jatobá neighbourhood, the first of the five settlements built by the company Norte Energía to resettle families displaced from the city of Altamira by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the northern state of Pará in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ALTAMIRA, Brazil, Jul 31 2015 (IPS)

Paulo de Oliveira drives a taxi in the northern Brazilian city of Altamira, but only when he is out of work in what he considers his true profession: operator of heavy vehicles like trucks, mixers or tractor loaders.

For the past few months he has been driving a friend’s taxi at night, while waiting for a job on the construction site of the Belo Monte dam – a giant hydroelectric plant on the Xingú river in the Amazon rainforest which has given rise to sharply divided opinions in Brazil.

Oliveira, whose small stature contrasts with the enormous vehicles he drives, has lived in many different parts of the Amazon jungle. “I started in the Air Force, a civilian among military personnel, building airports, barracks and roads in Itaituba, Jacareacanga, Oriximiná, Humaitá and other municipalities,” he told IPS.

His sister’s death in a traffic accident brought him back to Altamira, where he became a garimpeiro or informal miner. “I was buried once in a tunnel 10 metres below ground,” he said.

He survived this and other risks and earned a lot of money mining gold and ferrying miners – who paid him a fortune – in a taxi back and forth from the city to the illegal mine. “But I spent it all on women,” he confessed.

He then moved to Manaus, the Amazon region’s capital of two million people, to work on the construction of the monumental bridge over the Negro river. After that he headed to Porto Velho, near the border with Bolivia. But he had a feeling that something would go wrong at the Jirau hydropower construction site and quit after a few months.

Just a few days later, in March 2011, the workers rioted, setting fire to 60 buses and almost all of the lodgings for 16,000 employees, and bringing to a halt construction on the Jirau dam and another nearby large hydropower plant, Santo Antônio, both of which are on the Madeira river.

After bouncing between jobs on different construction sites, at the age of 50 Oliveira found himself back in Altamira, a city of 140,000 people located 55 km from Belo Monte, where he already worked in 2013 and is trying to get a job again. But things are difficult, because the amount of work there is in decline, as construction of the cement structures is winding up.

And it is possible that workers like him, specialised in heavy construction, no longer have a future in building large hydroelectric dams. The controversy triggered by Belo Monte will make it hard for the country to carry out similar projects after this.

A bridge being built in a neighbourhood of the northern Amazon city of Altamira, because a small local river floods during rainy season. Works like these form part of the basic environmental plan designed to mitigate and compensate the impacts of the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, 55 km away. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The final assessment of the Belo Monte experience will determine the fate of the government’s plans to harness the energy of the Amazon rivers, the only ones that still have a strong enough flow to offer large-scale hydropower potential, which has been exhausted on rivers elsewhere in Brazil.

A study by the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute states that if the government’s construction plans for the 2005-2030 period are implemented, the hydropower dams in the Amazon will account for 67.5 percent of the new power generation in this country of 203 million people.

The next project of this magnitude, the São Luiz dam on the Tapajós river to the west of the Xingú river, is facing an apparently insurmountable obstacle: it would flood indigenous territory, which is protected by the constitution.

Belo Monte, whose original plan was modified to avoid flooding indigenous land, has drawn fierce criticism for affecting the way of life of native and riverbank communities. The public prosecutor’s office accuses the company that is building the dam, Norte Energía, of ethnocide and of failing to live up to requirements regarding indigenous communities, who in protest occupied and damaged some of the dam’s installations on several occasions.

São Luiz, designed to generate 8,040 MW, and other hydropower dams planned on the Tapajós river, are facing potentially more effective resistance, led by a large indigenous community that lives in the river basin – the Munduruku, who number around 12,000.

Just over 6,000 indigenous people belonging to nine different ethnic groups live in the Belo Monte area of influence, with nearly half of them living in towns and cities, Francisco Brasil de Moraes, in charge of the middle stretch of the Xingú river in Brazil’s national indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, told IPS.

Francisco Assis Cardoso (dark tank top, centre), in his new supermarket. The young entrepreneur opened the grocery store and a pharmacy in Jatobá, the new neighbourhood in the city of Altamira where his entire family was relocated due to the construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Another battle, for local development, has had less international repercussions than the indigenous question. But it could also be decisive when it comes to overcoming resistance to future hydroelectric dams in the Amazon.

Norte Energía, a consortium of 10 public and private companies and investment funds, has channeled some 1.1 billion dollars into activities aimed at mitigating and compensating for social and environmental impacts in 11 municipalities surrounding the megaproject.

This sum, unprecedented in a project of this kind, is equivalent to 12 percent of the total investment.

The company resettled 4,100 families displaced from their homes by the construction project and reservoir, and indemnified thousands more. It rebuilt part of Altamira and the town of Vitoria de Xingú, including basic sanitation works, and built or remodeled six hospitals, 30 health centres and 270 classrooms.

Nevertheless, complaints have rained down from all sides.

Norte Energía installed modern water and sewage treatment plants, and sewers and water networks in Altamira. But there was a 10-month delay before an agreement was signed in June to connect the water and sewer networks to the housing units, which the local government will administer and the company will finance.

And it will take even longer for the city council to create a municipal sanitation company and for the service to begin to operate.

“My family was promised three houses, because we have two married sons,” said José de Ribamar do Nascimento, 62, resettled in the neighbourhood of Jatobá, on the north side of Altamira, the first one built for families relocated from areas to be flooded by the reservoir. “But then they took away our right to two of them, maybe because I was unable to protest, since I’m ill.”

A water treatment station built in Altamira by Norte Energía, the consortium building the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. It is not yet operating, because the sewage network installed in the city is not connected to the buildings. Urban sanitation is one part of the development works which the company was required to provide. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Each 63-square-metre housing unit has three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom, and is built on 300 square metres of land in a neat new housing development with paved streets.

Nascimento, who has prostate cancer, has a hard time walking and survives on a small pension. But he is confident that the future will be more promising for the local population, thanks to the jobs generated by the hydropower plant.

“We live much better here,” said his wife, 61-year-old Anerita Trindade. “Our old house would get cut off by the water when it rained; we had to wade through the water, on little walkways made of rotten boards. Sometimes there’s no water or transportation to get downtown, but now we’re on dry land.”

The move especially benefited Francisco Assis Cardoso, who at the age of 32 has become the leading shopkeeper in Jatobá. His family of four siblings was assigned five houses in a row. That enabled him to build a supermarket and a pharmacy together with his mother. “I worked in a pharmacy, it’s what I know how to do,” he said.

But Norte Energía has been criticised for delays in providing the promised schools, buses and health posts in the five new neighbourhoods, and for what many say was an unfair distribution of new housing.

A Plan for Sustainable Regional Development of the Xingú aims to go beyond compensation for relocation and other impacts of the dams. Together, society and governments choose projects that are financed with contributions from Norte Energía.

The Territorial Development Agenda was drafted on the basis of studies and consultations with a team hired by the government’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development, which financed 80 percent of the construction of the Belo Monte dam.

A third challenge for Belo Monte is to effectively combat criticism from voices within the power industry itself, who are opposed to run-of-the-river hydroelectric plants, where water flows in and out quickly, the reservoirs are small, and during the dry season the power generation is low.

Belo Monte will generate on average only 40 percent of its 11,233 MW of installed capacity. To avoid flooding indigenous lands, it reduced the size of the reservoir to 478 square kilometres – 39 percent of what was envisaged in the original plan drawn up in the 1980s.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A puddle is all that is left in one of the reservoirs of the Cantareira System, which normally supplies nearly half of the São Paulo metropolitan region. Courtesy of Ninja/ContaDagua.org

By Mario Osava
SÃO PAULO , Mar 10 2015 (IPS)

Six million people in Brazil’s biggest city, São Paulo, may at some point find themselves without water. The February rains did not ward off the risk and could even aggravate it by postponing rationing measures which hydrologists have been demanding for the last six months.

The threat is especially frightening for millions of people who have flocked here from Brazil’s poorest region, the semi-arid Northeast, many of whom fled the droughts that are so frequent there.

The Nordestinos did not imagine that they would face a scarcity of water in this land of abundance, where most of them have prospered. The most famous of them, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, became a trade union leader and eventually president of the country from 2003 to 2011.

“Our water tank holds 4,500 litres, which lasts us two days,” Luciano de Almeida, the owner of the restaurant Nación Nordestina, which serves 8,000 customers a month, told Tierramérica. “I’m looking for a place to put another tank so I’ll have 10,000 litres, negotiating with neighbours, since my roof might not support the weight.”

Many people in this city of 22 million people share his concern about storing more water, especially in the Zona Norte or northern zone of Greater São Paulo, which will be the first area affected by rationing if the state government decides to take measures aimed at guaranteeing water supplies year-round.

The Zona Norte is supplied by the Cantareira system of interconnecting reservoirs which, on the verge of collapse, is still providing water for six million people. It supplied nine million people up to mid-2014, when one-third of the demand was transferred to the other eight systems that provide water in the city.“Life in the Northeast has gotten easier. With the government’s social benefits, people aren’t suffering the same deprivations as before, even during the current drought, one of the worst in history.” -- Luciano de Almeida

It is precisely the Zona Norte that is home to many of the Nordestino migrants and their descendants, as reflected by the numerous restaurants that offer typical food from the Northeast, such as carne-de-sol (heavily salted beef cured in the sun), cassava flour and different kinds of beans.

Almeida, 40, was born in São Paulo. But his father came from the Northeast, the first of 14 siblings to leave the northeastern state of Pernambuco in search of a better life in the big city. He came in 1960, two years after one of the worst droughts ever to hit the region.

He found a job in a steel mill, where “he earned so much money that a year later he went back home for vacation.” His brothers and sisters started to follow in his footsteps, said Almeida, who discovered his vocation when he spent eight years working in the restaurant of one of his uncles, before opening his own.

“Life in the Northeast has gotten easier. With the government’s social benefits, people aren’t suffering the same deprivations as before, even during the current drought, one of the worst in history,” said Almeida, who frequently visits his father’s homeland, where his wife, with whom he has a seven-year-old daughter, also hails from.

And the rural population, the hardest-hit by drought, has learned to live with the semi-arid climate in the Northeast, collecting rainwater in tanks, for drinking, household use and irrigation of their small-scale crops. This social technology has now been adapted by the Movimento Cisterna Já, a São Paulo organisation, to help people weather the water crisis here.

A rural settlement in the northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, where water tanks have been installed to collect and store rainwater and make it fit for drinking. Initiatives like this one have modified the local population’s relationship with the recurrent drought in the semi-arid region. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“One of my 20 employees decided to go back to the Northeast; he plans to use his savings to buy a truck and sell water there,” said Almeida. This reverse migration is driven by the improved living conditions in that region, Brazil’s most impoverished and driest area.

Paulo Santos, the 38-year-old manager of the restaurant Feijão de Corda in the Zona Norte, also plans to return to his home city, Vitoria da Conquista in the northeast state of Bahía, which he left 20 years ago “to try my hand at better work than farming.”

“I’m tired, life in São Paulo is too stressful. The drought makes things worse, but there will be a solution to that one way or another. Vitoria da Conquista has grown a lot, now it has everything, and living standards there are better,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Alliance for Water, a network of 46 social and environmental organisations from the state of São Paulo, is lobbying the state government and mobilising society with the aim of “building water security” in the city.

The February rains, which were heavier than average, helped the Cantareira system’s reservoirs recover some of their capacity. But the situation is still “extremely serious,” Marussia Whately, the head of the Alliance, told Tierramérica.

“This requires an all-out effort, especially to relieve the suffering of the poor outlying neighbourhoods, which do not have water tanks and can’t store up water for the hours or days without supply,” said Delcio Rodrigues, an activist with the group and the vice president of the Vitae Civilis Institute, which focuses on climate change.

But, he complained, the state government and its water company, Sabesp, prefer “to generate confusion” by reporting that on Feb. 23 the water level in the Cantareira system reached 10.5 percent, double the late January level – while failing to clarify that they were referring to the “dead” or inactive storage water in the Cantareira system below the intake point, the water that cannot be drained from a reservoir by gravity and can only be pumped out.

The company has been using this storage water since July 2014.

Using the intake point as the reference, the level is minus 18.5 percent – far below the 12.3 percent of April 2014.

The water crisis is the result of two years of drought in southeast Brazil. Exceptional rainfall would be needed in the rest of March in order to store up water for the six-month dry season. But because that is unlikely, experts in hydrology are calling for immediate rationing to avoid a total collapse.

Sabesp has imposed undeclared rationing by reducing the water pressure in the pipes, which leads to an interruption in supply in many areas during certain parts of the day. The company also fines those who increase consumption and offers discounts to those who reduce it.

But the Alliance for Water is calling for emergency measures such as public campaigns, transparent crisis management and heavy fines against waste. It also proposes 10 medium-term actions, such as more participative management, reduction of water loss, reforestation of drainage basins, and improved sewage treatment.

In its attempt to avoid the political costs of rationing, the state government decided to use water from the Billings reservoir to meet demand. According to Rodrigues, this is “appalling” because that water is heavily polluted, with mercury, for example, which poses a serious health risk.

But because of the crisis, reforestation has been stepped up in the water basins. That is necessary for the Cantareira system, where only 20 percent of the original vegetation still survives, Whately said. Forests improve water production and retention and curb erosion, but it is a long-term solution, and cannot resolve the current emergency, she added.

This article was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Forest tribes in India’s southwestern Andhra Pradesh state fear they will soon be homeless when a dam floods their ancestral lands. They are turning to sustainable agriculture in preparation for displacement to less fertile areas. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
CHINTOOR, India, Feb 10 2015 (IPS)

Laxman, a 10-year-old Koya tribal boy, looks admiringly at a fenced-in vegetable patch behind his home in southern India’s Andhra Pradesh state. Velvety-green and laden with vegetables, the half-acre patch is where Laxman’s family gets their daily quota of nutritious food.

But one day soon it will disappear under several feet of water, thanks to the Polavaram multipurpose project – a 45-metre-high, 2.32-km-long mega dam currently under construction on the Godavari, the second-longest river in India after the Ganges.

Experts say nearly 200,000 members of India's forest-dwelling tribes could be displaced by construction of the Polavaram Dam in the southwestern state of Andhra Pradesh.
A crucial link in the federal government’s river-linking project, the Polavaram dam will submerge at least 276 villages, including Narakonda, where Laxman’s family lives.

Blissfully unaware today, young Laxman will soon be among the nearly 200,000 tribal people who experts say will be displaced en masse by the development project.

Laxman’s parents, Sitamma Rao and Sodi Bhimaiah, know that when the water comes, they will have to pack up and leave their village. The government has expressed its intention to properly compensate those affected but the community here has neither heard of nor seen the results of such promises.

To this day, no government official has visited these villages, where many tribal families earn about 30 Indian rupees (0.50 dollars) each day.

Diversifying crops

They know they must prepare for hard times ahead, but with no advice, support or official assistance forthcoming from the government, tribal villagers have embarked on their own quest for alternative livelihoods.

In dozens of villages along the dam site, in the foothills of the Papi mountain range, the hunter-gather Koya and Kondareddi tribes, both listed as particularly vulnerable tribal communities by the Indian government, are learning sustainable farming to better feed their families – and save what little they can for the dark days to come.

Having dwelt in the Papi hill ranges on either side of the Godavari gorge for generations, practicing small-scale farming and selling minor forest products at nearby markets, the tribes are now looking at more sustainable practices that will increase their yield and perhaps even provide them a surplus of food and income.

Helping them in this quest is Kovel Foundation – a local non-profit that trains forest tribes in entrepreneurial and alternative livelihood skills. Under a three-year project, Kovel is training 2,000 marginal women farmers from 46 villages in the ‘Annapurna Model’ – a multi-crop farming technique – as well as providing them with seeds and financial assistance.

The model was originally conceived by the federal government to help rural women farmers achieve food security and maintain a yearly income of between 50,000 and 100,000 rupees (800 to 1,600 dollars).

Prior to this scheme, tribal communities in the region gathered forest fruits and herbs, and earned a meager monthly salary of between eight and 24 dollars by selling forest products.

Now they are diversifying crops, spreading out their risks and increasing their modest yields.

Hailing from the nearby village of Aligudem, which will also be submerged by the dam, a farmer named Laxamma Raju shows IPS her year-old garden: half an acre of land divided into 15 beds, each of them seven feet wide.

A narrow trench separates the beds, made from rich soil topped with silt, compost and cow dung. Growing on each of these nutrient-filled plots is a different crop: radish, okra, eggplant, carrot, onion, bitter gourd, pumpkin, cow bean, tomatoes, chili and coriander.

There are also banana saplings, planted alongside mango and custard apple trees.

Interspersed among them are yellow marigolds and sunflowers. The bright flowers attract pests, working as organic insect traps, explains Satya Raju, Laxamma’s husband.

The idea of growing and consuming so many crops excites farmers here, who have never before enjoyed such a varied diet.

“Earlier, we grew rice, some millets and chickpeas,” Laxamma tells IPS. “But from last year, we have been growing multiple crops, and harvesting a basket of vegetables every week,” she adds, pointing to a bag of tomatoes that she is going to sell in the market for 15 rupees a kilo. All told, she will take home about 1,200 rupees (about 20 dollars) each month from her multi-crop farm.

These are no small strides for forest tribes, 70 percent of whose population lives below the poverty line according to government data. Few attend school, or learn to read and write. The literacy level among such remote tribes in Andhra Pradesh is estimated at 47 percent.

When development means displacement

One of the major challenges for tribes in this area is the lack of irrigation facilities, says Beera Voina Murali, a Koya tribesman and a trainer with the Kovel Foundation.

“The monsoon is the only source of water,” Murali tells IPS. “Though the department of tribal affairs offers a 50 percent subsidy on diesel-powered pumps, they still cost over a lakh (2,000 dollars) – marginal farmers cannot afford that kind of money.”

And even those who do manage to install these costly devices struggle to pay for the fuel. Laxmamma, for example, spends about 10 dollars every day just to keep the pump going, since it guzzles roughly nine litres of diesel daily.

Meeting this irrigation challenge in the region is one of the stated goals of the Polavaram dam project; with a storing capacity of 551 million cubic metres, the dam promises to irrigate 700,000 acres of land.

But this “solution” represents disaster for over a quarter of a million people in this area, including farmers like Sitamma, who are will be completely inundated once the project is completed.

“Today, we can’t cultivate well because we don’t have water. But tomorrow when the water comes, we will lose our home,” says Edu Konda, another Kovel Foundation trainer who has been actively protesting the construction of the dam, but with little hope of a change in government policy.

Last year, concerned community members met with the project officer in charge of the dam at the department of tribal affairs in Rampachodavaram and made an appeal to save the threatened lands.

“He said, ‘You will be relocated into good, fertile areas,’” Konda recalls, “but the very next month he was transferred out of this district. Now, we are back to level zero,” she tells IPS.

India’s track record of relocating and rehabilitating tribal communities displaced by development projects leaves a lot to be desired. One such example is the Sardar Sarovar dam over the river Narmada in central India that displaced 300,000 tribal people in 2005.

Over a decade later, 40,000 of these people are still waiting to be relocated, or compensated for their lost lands.

A similar controversy unfolded around the site of the Hasdeo Bango dam in central India’s Chhattisgarh state. Construction of the dam that began in 1962 and ended in 2011 affected 52 mostly tribal villages. But they have been poorly relocated and even today have few basic facilities and even fewer livelihood opportunities, according to government data.

Against this backdrop, some community members feel it is futile to adopt new farming techniques when they could soon be landless. The vast majority, however, are convinced that their newly acquired sustainable agricultural practices will serve them well – even if they are forcibly moved to less fertile areas.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The heat island generated by São Paulo draws rainfall away from the water sources the city depends on. Credit: Rafael Neddermeyer/Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Agricultural losses are no longer the most visible effect of the drought plaguing Brazil’s most developed region. Now the energy crisis and the threat of water shortages in the city of São Paulo are painful reminders of just how dependent Brazilians are on regular rainfall.

Nine million of the 21 million inhabitants of Greater São Paulo are waiting for the completion of the upgrading of the Cantareira system, made up of six reservoirs linked by 48 km of tunnels and canals, which can no longer supply enough water.

For the past four months, the water that has reached the taps of nine million residents of Brazil’s biggest city has come from the “dead” or inactive storage water in the Cantareira system – the water that cannot be drained from a reservoir by gravity and can only be pumped out. These supplies will last until Mar. 15, 2015, according to the state government.

“If rainfall in the [upcoming southern hemisphere] summer is only average, we will have another complicated autumn; and if it rains less it will mean a collapse,” architect Marussia Whately, a water resource specialist with the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), told Tierramérica.

There is no possible replacement system, she said, because Cantareira supplies water to 45 percent of the metropolitan area, distributed by Sao Paulo’s state water utility Sabesp, while other water sources are also low due to drought and pollution.

Whately said the intensification of extreme weather events, such as this year’s drought in southeast Brazil, preceded by two years of below normal rainfall, is one of the causes of the water crisis in the state.

To that is added poor management, which has mainly sought to increase supply by tapping into distant sources that require infrastructure to transport water long distances, without adequately combating losses and waste, she said. But in her view, the main reason is “the lack of dialogue and social participation” regarding water supply.

Droughts have become more frequent and intense this century. “The first alert came in 2001, when the system was reduced to 11 percent of capacity in August,” said journalist and activist Isabel Raposo, who has lived for 30 years in the Sierra da Cantareira, a forested mountain range north of the city with a huge state park. Water piped in from far away flows through the hills.

“The current crisis could have been avoided” if the large-scale reuse of water had been adopted after the crisis 13 years ago, Ivanildo Hespanhol, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of São Paulo, told Tierramérica.

The Jacareí reservoir, part of the Cantareira supply system, has begun pumping inactive storage water to São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, which is stricken by drought. Credit: Vagner Campos/Fotos Públicas

The five sewage treatment plants in the metropolitan region provide primary processing of 16,000 litres per second. But with further treatment the wastewater could be prepared for a wide range of uses, and could even be made potable, said the renowned expert.

That could increase the total amount of water available in the city by one-quarter – enough to relieve the pressure on the water sources and make it possible to replenish them, even with lower than normal levels of rainfall.

“Unfortunately decision-makers don’t plan, but only manage the crisis,” said Hespanhol, who is confident that the situation will give a boost to “the concept of water treatment and reuse.”

Industrial companies already use these techniques, reducing their water consumption by up to 80 percent and recuperating their investments in under two years, he said. Political will and a “realistic legal framework” are lacking, as well as a better understanding of the issue by the environmental authorities, he added.

The emergency now requires more urgent measures, said Whately, such as reducing waste, which leads to losses of up to 30 percent according to different institutions; incentives for saving water; and better use of existing water resources.

Given the “failure of the current model of water management,” with regulatory agencies lacking authority and basin committees that are ignored, ISA is trying to identify and mobilise concerned experts and institutions to discuss a diagnosis and solutions for the water crisis, she said.

“More than 90 proposals for short-term measures have been presented,” she added.

The 2001 drought led to a power shortage and blackouts that forced Brazilians to reduce electricity consumption for nine months starting in June of that year. The drop in the water level in rivers hurt the hydropower plants, which produced 90 percent of the electrical energy consumed in Brazil at the time.

As a result, the energy sector was restructured, with an expansion of thermoelectricity, which is more costly and more polluting because it uses fossil fuels, but provides a measure of energy security. Hydropower’s share of the country’s installed capacity thus fell to 67 percent.

For that reason, this year’s drought, even though it has been more severe in many basins, did not create an energy deficit, but drove up the price of electricity due to the full use of thermal power plants, generating insolvency problems for energy distributors, which were bailed out by the government, and exacerbating the difficulties suffered by the most energy-dependent industries.

The vast sugarcane fields of the state of São Paulo have also suffered from the persistent drought, which cut short the harvest and aggravated the crisis in the sugar and ethanol industries. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Even worse, because it affects millions of people, is the water supply problem in São Paulo and the surrounding areas. At least 30 cities have implemented mandatory water restrictions in the past few months.

In Itu, a city of 160,000 located 100 km from São Paulo, local inhabitants have held demonstrations and occupied the city council building in September, to protest supply problems that were worse than what the local water company had announced.

In São Paulo, people in the neighbourhoods supplied by the Cantareira system complain that water has been rationed, without any officially announced measures, for several months. Sabesp, the main water supplier throughout the state of São Paulo, admitted that it had lowered the water pressure in the pipes at night to prevent leaks and waste.

“We had no water for three or four days in August,” said economist Marcelo Costa Santos, who lives in an 18-story building in Alto Pinheiros, a quiet neighbourhood on the west side of São Paulo. He told Tierramérica that the low water pressure made it impossible to pump water up to the higher floors.

And climate change threatens to aggravate the situation. A good part of the rain that falls in southeast Brazil comes from the Amazon rainforest, where deforestation has reduced humidity levels.

It can be inferred that São Paulo is receiving less water from the Amazon, said Antonio Nobre with the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

Deforestation, the researcher told Tierramérica, also weakens the “flying rivers” – currents of air that carry water vapor resulting from evapotranspiration in the rainforest to the interior of Brazil. Rainfall in the centre and south of the country depends on the Amazon “water pump”.

Another local phenomenon aggravates the situation. The “heat island” formed by the increase in urban temperatures in Greater São Paulo attracts rain away from water sources, said Raposo.

Recent studies found that rainfall is generally more intense in the city of São Paulo than in the nearby mountains that feed the reservoirs of the Cantareira system. Twofold damage is the consequence: cities suffer constant flooding even though it is raining less than necessary, the activist said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Trees on the bank of the Blanco river that have been felled to make way for a power plant. Hydroelectric projects are threatening biodiversity and the way of life of communities in the state of Veracruz, in southeast Mexico. Credit: Courtesy of Comité de Defensa Libre

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 15 2014 (IPS)

Since January, villagers and townspeople near the Los Pescados river in southeast Mexico have been blocking the construction of a dam, part of a multi-purpose project to supply potable water to Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz.

“Our rights to a pollution-free life, to decide where and how we live, to information, to free, prior and informed consultation, are being infringed. We don’t want our territory to just be invaded like this any more,” Gabriela Maciel, an activist with the Pueblos Unidos de la Cuenca Antigua por Ríos Libres (PUCARL – Peoples of La Antigua Basin United For Free Rivers), told IPS.

PUCARL is made up of residents from 43 communities in 12 municipalities within the La Antigua river basin. Together with other organisations, it succeeded in achieving a suspension of work on the dam that was being built near Jalcomulco by Odebrecht, a Brazilian company, and the State of Veracruz Water Commission.

The dam has a planned capacity of 130 million cubic metres, a reservoir surface area of 4.13 square kilometres and a cost of over 400 million dollars. It is one of more than a hundred dams planned by federal and state governments, which are causing conflict with local communities.

Infrastructure building on a vast scale is under way in Mexico as part of the country’s energy reform. The definitive legal framework for this was enacted Aug. 11, opening up electricity generation and sales, as well as oil and gas extraction, refining, distribution and retailing, to participation by the domestic and foreign private sectors.

Nine new laws were created and another 12 were amended, implementing the historic constitutional reform that was promulgated Dec. 20.“Fossil fuels should not be given greater priority than a healthy environment. Zoning should be carried out, where possible, to indicate areas for exploitation and to establish constraints." -- Manuel Llano

The new energy framework is expected to attract dizzying sums in investments from national and international sources to Mexico, the second largest economy in Latin America, during the four-year period 2015-2018, according to official forecasts.

On Aug. 18 the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) announced 16 investment projects worth 4.9 billion dollars. Of this total, 27 percent is for public projects and 73 percent is earmarked for the private sector.

In the framework of the 2014-2018 National Infrastructure Programme (PNI), the CFE is planning 138 projects for a total of 46 billion dollars, including hydroelectric, wind, solar and geothermal energy generation plants, transmission lines and power distribution networks.

“Environmental and social legislation has been undermined in order to attract investment. Laws guaranteeing peoples’ rights and land rights have been weakened. This heightens the risk of a flare-up of social and environmental conflicts. It is a backward step,” Mariana González, a researcher on transparency and accountability for Centro de Análisis Fundar, an analysis and research centre, told IPS.

State oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) is programmed to carry out 124 projects as part of the PNI, totalling over 253 billion dollars. They include gas pipelines, improvements to refineries, energy efficiency measures at oil installations and oil exploration and extraction projects, among others.

The majority of the planned investments are slated for the southeastern state of Campeche, where 43 billion dollars will be spent on the exploitation and maintenance of four offshore oilfields.

In second place is the adjacent state of Tabasco, with projects amounting to nearly 15 billion dollars for shallow water oilfields and for the construction and remodelling of oil installations.

In Veracruz, PEMEX is planning investments of 11 billion dollars in shallow water offshore reserves and building and modernising oil installations, while in the northeastern state of

Tamaulipas it will spend 6.67 billion dollars on deepwater facilities and infrastructure modernisation.
Hydrocarbons licensing rounds

On Aug. 13, the Energy ministry (SENER) determined Round Zero (R-0) allocations, assigning PEMEX the rights to 120 oilfields, equivalent to 71 percent of national oil production which is to remain under state control.

PEMEX was also awarded 73 percent of gas production in R-0.

PEMEX’s current daily production is 2.39 million barrels of crude and 6.5 billion cubic feet of gas.

For Round One (R-1) concessions, SENER called for tenders from private operators for 109 oil and gas exploration blocks and 60 production blocks.

The government estimates the investment required for these projects at 8.52 billion dollars between 2015 and 2018, for exploration and extraction in deep and shallow waters, land-based oilfields and unconventional fossil fuels like shale gas.

The National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), the industry regulator, is preparing the terms for the concessions. Contracts will be assigned between May and September 2015.

Manuel Llano, technical coordinator for Conservación Humana, an NGO, cross-referenced maps of the detailed areas involved in Round Zero and Round One with protected natural areas, indigenous peoples’ and community territories.

He told IPS that the total land area assigned in R-0 is nearly 48,000 square kilometres, distributed in 142 municipalities and 11 states. Most of the assigned area is in Veracruz, followed by Tabasco. R-1 allocations cover 11,000 square kilometres in 68 municipalities and eight states.

The lands affected by R-0 overlap with 1,899 out of the country’s 32,000 farming communities. R-1 areas affect another 671 community territories, representing 4,416 square kilometres of collectively owned land.

Thirteen indigenous peoples living in an area of 2,810 square kilometres are affected by the R-0 allocations. Among the affected groups are the Chontal, Totonac and Popoluca peoples. The R-1 areas involve five indigenous peoples, including the Huastec, Nahuatl and Totonac, and more than 3,200 square kilometres of land.

“It’s hard to say exactly which places will be worst affected. There could be a great deal of damage in a very small area. It depends on the particular situation in each case. I can make reasonable estimates about what might occur in a specific concession area, but not in all of them,” Llano said.

Llano carried out a similar exercise in 2013, when he produced the “Atlas de concesiones mineras, conservación y pueblos indígenas” (Atlas of mining concessions, conservation areas and indigenous peoples). For this he mapped mining concession areas and compared them with protected areas and indigenous territories.

The new Hydrocarbons Law leaves land owners no option but to reach agreement with PEMEX or the private licensed operators over the occupation of their land, or accept a judicial ruling if agreement cannot be reached.

“The institutions have not carried out their work correctly. We know how the government apparatus works to get what it wants. We will oppose the approval of concessions and they will not succeed. We will continue our struggle. We are not alone; other peoples have the same problems,” said Maciel, the PUCARL activist.

Since March, several social organisations have taken collective legal action against government agencies for authorising the dam on La Antigua river and its environmental consequences. Los Pescados river is a tributary of La Antigua.

Between 2009 and 2013, SEMARNAT, the Environment and Natural Resources ministry, gave the green light to 12 hydroelectric and mini-hydropower plants on rivers in Veracruz. Construction has not yet begun on these projects.

Llano intends to compare maps of oil and gas reserves with the concession areas and contracts that are granted, in order to locate the potential resources claimed by the government and identify whether they match the bids at auction.

“Fossil fuels should not be given greater priority than a healthy environment. Zoning should be carried out, where possible, to indicate areas for exploitation and to establish constraints,” he said.
Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Fishermen's boats on the Mekong River in northern Laos. There are already 30 existing dams along the river, and an additional 134 hydropower projects are planned for the lower Mekong. Credit: Irwin Loy/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 29 2014 (IPS)

Large-scale dams are likely having a detrimental impact on water quality and biodiversity around the world, according to a new study that tracks and correlates data from thousands of projects.

Focusing on the 50 most substantial river basins, researchers with International Rivers, a watchdog group, compiled and compared available data from some 6,000 of the world’s estimated 50,000 large dams. Eighty percent of the time, they found, the presence of large dams, typically those over 15 metres high, came along with findings of poor water quality, including high levels of mercury and trapped sedimentation.“The evidence we’ve compiled of planetary-scale impacts from river change is strong enough to warrant a major international focus on understanding the thresholds for river change in the world’s major basins." -- Jason Rainey

While the investigators are careful to note that the correlations do not necessarily indicate causal relationships, the say the data suggest a clear, global pattern. They are now calling for an intergovernmental panel of experts tasked with coming up with a systemic method by which to assess and monitor the health of the world’s river basins.

“[R]iver fragmentation due to decades of dam-building is highly correlated with poor water quality and low biodiversity,” International Rivers said Tuesday in unveiling the State of the World’s Rivers, an online database detailing the findings. “Many of the world’s great river basins have been dammed to the point of serious decline.”

The group points to the Tigris-Euphrates basin, today home to 39 dams and one of the systems that has been most “fragmented” as a result. The effect appears to have been a vast decrease in the region’s traditional marshes, including the salt-tolerant flora that helped sustain the coastal areas, as well as a drop in soil fertility.

The State of the World project tracks the spread of dam-building alongside data on biodiversity and water-quality metrics in the river basins affected. While the project is using only previously published data, organisers say the effort is the first time that these disparate data sets have been overlaid in order to find broader trends.

“By and large most governments, particularly in the developing world, do not have the capacity to track this type of data, so in that sense they’re flying blind in setting policy around dam construction,” Zachary Hurwitz, the project’s coordinator, told IPS.

“We can do a much better job at observing [dam-affected] resettled populations, but most governments don’t have the capacity to do continuous biodiversity monitoring. Yet from our perspective, those data are what you really need in order to have a conversation around energy planning.”

Dam-building boom

Today, four of the five most fragmented river systems are in South and East Asia, according to the new data. But four others in the top 10 are in Europe and North America, home to some of the most extensive dam systems, especially the United States.

For all the debate in development circles in recent years about dam-building in developing countries, the new data suggests that two of the world’s poorest continents, Africa and South America, remain relatively less affected by large-scale damming than other parts of the world.

Of course, both Africa and South America have enormous hydropower potential and increasingly problematic power crunches, and many of the countries in these continents are moving quickly to capitalise on their river energy.

According to estimates from International Rivers, Brazil alone is currently planning to build more than 650 dams of all sizes. The country is also home to some of the highest numbers of species that would be threatened by such moves.

Not only are Brazil, China and India busy building dams at home, but companies from these countries are also increasingly selling such services to other developing countries.

“Precisely those basins that are least fragmented are currently being targeted for a great expansion of dam-building,” Hurwitz says. “But if we look at the experience and data from areas of high historical dam-building – the Mississippi basin the United States, the Danube basin in Europe – those worrying trends are likely to be repeated in the least-fragmented basins if this proliferation of dam-building continues.”

Advocates are expressing particularly concern over the confluence of the new strengthened focus on dam-building and the potential impact of climate change on freshwater biodiversity. International Rivers is calling for an intergovernmental panel to assess the state of the world’s river basins, aimed at developing metrics for systemic assessment and best practices for river preservation.

“The evidence we’ve compiled of planetary-scale impacts from river change is strong enough to warrant a major international focus on understanding the thresholds for river change in the world’s major basins, and for the planet as a whole system,” Jason Rainey, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.

Economic burden

Particularly for increasingly energy-starved developing countries, concerns around large-scale dam-building go beyond environmental or even social considerations.

Energy access remains a central consideration in any set of development metrics, and lack of energy is an inherent drag on issues as disparate as education and industry. Further, concerns around climate change have re-energised what had been flagging interest in large dam projects, epitomised by last year’s decision by the World Bank to refocus on such projects.

Yet there remains fervent debate around whether this is the best way to go, particularly for developing countries. Large dams typically cost several billion dollars and require extensive planning to complete, and in the past these plans have been blamed for overwhelming fragile economies.

A new touchstone in this debate came out earlier this year, in a widely cited study from researchers at Oxford University. Looking at nearly 250 large dams dating back as far as the 1920s, they found pervasive cost and time overruns.

“We find overwhelming evidence that budgets are systematically biased below actual costs of large hydropower dams,” the authors wrote in the paper’s abstract.

“The outside view suggests that in most countries large hydropower dams will be too costly … and take too long to build to deliver a positive risk-adjusted return unless suitable risk management measures … can be affordably provided.”

Instead, the researchers encouraged policymakers in developing countries to focus on “agile energy alternatives” that can be built more quickly.

On the other side of this debate, the findings were attacked by the International Commission on Large Dams, a Paris-based NGO, for focusing on an unrepresentative set of extremely large dams. The group’s president, Adama Nombre, also questioned the climate impact of the researchers’ preferred alternative options.

“What would be those alternatives?” Nombre asked. “Fossil fuel plants consuming coal or gas. Without explicitly saying it, the authors use a purely financial reasoning to bring us toward a carbon-emitting electric system.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

The Aysén region in Chile’s southern Patagonia wilderness has some of the largest freshwater reserves on the planet thanks to its swift-running rivers, innumerable lakes, and lagoons like the one in this picture, located 20 km from Coyhaique, the regional capital. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
COYHAIQUE, Chile , Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

After its victory in a nearly decade-long struggle against HidroAysén, a project that would have built five large hydroelectric dams on wilderness rivers, Chile’s Patagonia region is gearing up for a new battle: blocking a quiet attempt to build a dam on the Cuervo River.

The dam would be constructed in an unpopulated area near Yulton lake, in Aysén, Chile’s water-rich region in the south. The aim is to ease the energy shortage that has plagued this country for decades and has prompted an accelerated effort to diversify the energy mix and boost the electricity supply.

However, the Cuervo River project is “much less viable than HidroAysén, because of environmental and technical reasons and risks,” Peter Hartmann, coordinator of the Aysén Life Reserve citizen coalition, told Tierramérica, expressing the view widely shared by environmentalists in the region.

The big concern of opponents to the new hydroelectric initiative is that it could be approved as a sort of bargaining chip, after the government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet cancelled HidroAysén on Jun. 10.

Endorsement of the Cuervo River dam will also be favoured by an Aug. 21 court ruling that gave the project a boost.

The Cuervo Hydroelectric Plant Project is being developed by Energía Austral, a joint venture of the Swiss firm Glencore and Australia’s Origin Energy. It would be built at the headwaters of the Cuervo River, some 45 km from the city of Puerto Aysén, the second-largest city in the region after Coyhaique, the capital.

It would generate a total of approximately 640 MW, with the potential to reduce the annual emissions of the Sistema Interconectado Central de Chile (SIC) – the central power grid – by around 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide.

Energía Austral is studying the possibility of a submarine power cable or an aerial submarine power line.

In 2007, the regional commission on the environment rejected an initial environmental impact study presented by the company.

Two years later, Energía Austral introduced a new environmental impact study, for the construction of a hydropower complex that would include two more dams: a 360-MW plant on the Blanco River and a 54-MW plant on Lake Cóndor, to be built after the Cuervo River plant.

“Cuervo appeared when HidroAysén was at its zenith, and the Cuervo River dam was a second priority for the Patagonia Without Dams campaign,” said Hartmann, who is also the regional director of the National Committee for the Defence of Flora and Fauna (CODEFF).

“In the beginning there was diligent monitoring of the project, from the legal sphere, but we ran out of funds and the entire focus shifted to HidroAysén as the top priority, and not Cuervo,” he added.

According to the experts, the Cuervo River plant would pose more than just an environmental risk, because it would be built on the Liquiñe-Ofqui geological fault zone, an area of active volcanoes.

For example, a minor eruption of the Hudson volcano in October 2011 prompted a red alert and mass evacuation of the surrounding areas. Mount Hudson is located “right behind the area where the Blanco River plant would be built,” Hartmann said.

“Energía Austral is doing everything possible not to mention the Hudson volcano, because it knows what it’s getting involved in,” he added.

In response to such concerns, the company has insisted that the plant “will be safe with regard to natural phenomena like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.” It adds that “the presence of geological fault lines is not exclusive to the Cuervo River.”

It also argues that in Chile and around the world many plants have been built on geological fault lines or near volcanoes, and have operated normally even after a seismic event.

The national authorities approved the construction of the Cuervo dam in 2013. But shortly afterwards the Supreme Court accepted a plea presented by environmental and citizen organisations to protect the area where it is to be built, and ordered a thorough study of the risks posed by construction of the plant.

However, on Aug. 21 the Court ratified, in a unanimous ruling, the environmental permits that the authorities had granted for construction of the dam. The verdict paves the way for final approval by the government, which would balance out its rejection of HidroAysén.

“The state is not neutral with respect to energy production; we are interested in seeing projects go forward that would help us overcome our infrastructure deficit,” Energy Minister Máximo Pacheco said in June.

And in July he stated that “Chile cannot feel comfortable while hydroelectricity makes up such a small share of our energy mix, given that it is a clean source of energy that is abundant in our country.”

Chile has an installed capacity of approximately 17,000 MW, 74 percent in the SIC central grid, 25 percent in the northern grid – the Sistema Interconectado Norte Grande – and less than one percent in the medium-sized grids of the Aysén and Magallanes regions in the south.

According to the Energy Ministry, demand for electricity in Chile will climb to 100,000 MW by 2020. An additional 8,000 MW of installed capacity will be needed to meet that demand.
Chile imports 60 percent of the primary energy that it consumes. Hydropower makes up 40 percent of the energy mix, which is dependent on highly polluting fossil fuels that drive thermal power stations for the rest.

Currently, 62 percent of the new energy plants under construction are thermal power stations. And 92 percent of those will be coal-fired.

Regional Energy Secretary Juan Antonio Bijit told Tierramérica that independently of Aysén’s enormous hydropower potential, “if we analyse the energy mix, it is highly dependent on thermal power, so the most logical thing would appear to be to increase supply in the area of hydroelectricity.”

He said the Aysén region “currently produces around 40 MW of energy, which only covers domestic consumption.”

But, he said, “we have significant potential” in terms of hydroelectricity as well as wind and solar power.

“The region’s capacity for electricity generation is quite strong,” he said. “However, we have to study how we will generate power, and for what uses.”

Bijit said the region’s contribution of energy to the rest of the country “should be analysed together with the community.”

“We can’t do things behind closed doors; we have to talk to the people,” he said. “That was done in a workshop prior to the decision reached on HidroAysén and now we are doing it with the Energía Austral project and others,” he said.

“The idea is that the people should be participants in what is being done or should be done in the field of energy,” he added.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Patagonia Without Dams activists broke out in cheers when they heard the decision reached by a ministerial committee to reject the HidroAysén dam project on Tuesday Jun. 10. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Chile

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO , Jun 11 2014 (IPS)

The Chilean government rejected Tuesday the controversial HidroAysén project for the construction of five hydroelectric dams on rivers in the south of the country. The decision came after years of struggle by environmental groups and local communities, who warned the world of the destruction the dams would wreak on the Patagonian wilderness.

“This is a historic day,” Juan Pablo Orrego, the international coordinator of the Patagonia Without Dams campaign, told IPS after the decision was announced.

“I am moved that the citizens – because this was a victory by the citizens – managed to finally inspire a government to do the right thing in the face of a mega-project,” he added.

The decision was reached after a three-hour meeting by a committee of ministers of the government of socialist President Michelle Bachelet, who took office for a second term in March.

The committee, made up of the ministers of environment, energy, agriculture, mining, economy and health, unanimously accepted the 35 complaints presented against the project, 34 of which were introduced by communities and others opposed to the initiative and the last of which was presented by the company itself.

The decision took six years to arrive, after a number of legal battles. And in response to the announcement people took to the streets in Patagonia, a wilderness region in southern Chile, to celebrate.

“This ministerial committee has decided to accept the complaints presented by the community, by the citizens, and annul the environmental permit for the HidroAysén project,” Environment Minister Pablo Badenier told reporters, declaring that the dam had been rejected by the government.

The company, owned by Italian firm Endesa-Enel (which holds a 51 percent share) and Chile’s Colbún, has 30 days to appeal the resolution in an environmental court in Valdivia, in southern Chile.

During the election campaign, President Bachelet had stated that the dams were not viable.

In May, when her administration unveiled its energy agenda, she said she would promote renewable unconventional energy sources and the use of natural gas, in contrast with the plan of her predecessor, Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014), which favoured hydropower.

The HidroAysén project, presented in August 2007, was to involve the construction of five large hydroelectric dams on the Baker and Pascua rivers in Patagonia. But the following year, 32 of the 34 public agencies called on to pronounce themselves did so against the project.

Environmental groups, with the support of some government officials, have proposed UNESCO world heritage site status for the southern region of Aysén, where the dams were to be built some 1,600 km south of Santiago. Patagonia is not only biodiverse but is also one of the biggest reserves of freshwater in the world.

The dams would have flooded a total of 5,910 hectares of wilderness, for a total capacity of 2,750 MW for the national grid (SIC).

Chile has a total installed capacity of 17,000 MW: 74 percent in SIC, 25 percent in the great northern grid (SING), and the rest in medium-sized grids in the southern regions of Aysén and Magallanes.

The project also included a 1,912-km power line, the longest in the world, which was to run through nine of the 15 regions of this long narrow South American country.

Energy Minister Máximo Pacheco said the HidroAysén project “suffers from serious problems in its execution because it did not treat aspects related to the people who live there with due care and attention.”

He added that as energy minister “I have voted with complete peace and clarity of mind with respect to this project.”

Pacheco also said “the decision that was reached today does not compromise in the least the energy policy that we have designed in the energy agenda, but specifically refers to one project.”

Orrego, the environmentalist, said the decision against the construction of the HidroAysén dams “points to the end of the era of the thermoelectric and hydroelectric energy mega-projects – an era that in the developed countries ended a long time ago.”

Chile imports 97 percent of its fossil fuels and its energy mix is made up of 40 percent hydropower and the rest of polluting fossil fuels, used in thermoelectric plants.

The fact that Chile lacks domestic oil and natural gas means the cost of producing electricity per MW-hour is among the highest in Latin America – over 160 dollars, compared to 55 dollars in Peru, 40 in Colombia and 10 in Argentina.

The executive director of the association of electric companies (ASEL), Rodrigo Castillo, said on Tuesday that the resolution “refers to one project in particular and does not make it impossible to use hydrological resources in southern Chile in the future.”

But René Muga, the head of the association of power plants (AGG), said HidroAysén represented 40 percent of the energy needed by the country in the next 10 years, equivalent, according to his figures, to what seven or eight coal-fired plants would produce. “That energy is really necessary,” he argued.

Orrego said the Bachelet administration’s decision could bring it “very powerful political consequences.”

“It is a brave move,” the environmentalist said. “But it was inspired by the citizens, of that we have no doubt.”

“These many years of struggle have culminated in this resounding victory for the citizens,” Orrego added.

The Patagonia Without Dams campaign waged by a coalition of environmental and citizen groups and led by Orrego and prominent environmentalist Sara Larraín managed to mobilise the entire country against the HidroAysén project and drew international attention to the planned wilderness dams.

In opinion polls, three-quarters of respondents have said they were opposed to the dams. And in early 2011, more than 100,000 people took to the streets against HidroAysén.

Orrego, who won the Right Livelihood Award in 1998, expressed his gratitude to Chile, “because this campaign was carried out by the entire country.”

He also acknowledged the participation of “allies” in other countries, such as Argentina, Belgium, Italy and Spain.

In the Aysén región, critics of the project waited in a local cinema for the announcement of the ministerial committee’s decision, before marching through the streets of Coyhaique, the regional capital, to celebrate.

Patricio Segura of the Citizen Coalition for the Aysen Life Reserve told IPS that the government’s decision “was the right thing in terms of sustainability and the construction of the energy mix that we as a country deserve.”

“We hoped President Michelle Bachelet’s political commitment would be fulfilled, as well as the duty to set aside an irregular project that advanced due to lobbying and pressure,” he added.

Segura said the project “generated tremendous polarisation in the Aysén region,” and he complained that “they managed to divide the people of Aysén without even laying one brick.”

As a result, he said, this decision lays the foundation “for us to sit down in Aysén and discuss what really matters, which is the Aysén Life Reserve.”

“Now we have to discuss a sovereign and sustainable energy mix for the Aysén region, including our region’s abundant water resources and wind energy,” he added.

The Beni river, a tributary of the Madeira river, when it overflowed its banks in 2011 upstream of Cachuela Esperanza, where the Bolivian government is planning the construction of a hydropower dam. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 16 2014 (IPS)

Deforestation, especially in the Andean highlands of Bolivia and Peru, was the main driver of this year’s disastrous flooding in the Madeira river watershed in Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest and the drainage basin across the border, in Brazil.

That is the assessment of Marc Dourojeanni, professor emeritus at the National Agrarian University in Lima, Peru.

His analysis stands in contrast with the views of environmentalists and authorities in Bolivia, who blame the Jirau and Santo Antônio hydroelectric dams built over the border in Brazil for the unprecedented flooding that has plagued the northern Bolivian department or region of Beni.

“That isn’t logical,” Dourojeanni told IPS. Citing the law of gravity and the topography, he pointed out that in this case Brazil would suffer the effects of what happens in Bolivia rather than the other way around – although he did not deny that the dams may have caused many other problems.

The Madeira river (known as the Madera in Bolivia and Peru, which it also runs across) is the biggest tributary of the Amazon river, receiving in its turn water from four large rivers of over 1,000 km in length.

The Madeira river’s watershed covers more than 900,000 square km – similar to the surface area of Venezuela and nearly twice the size of Spain.

In Bolivia, which contains 80 percent of the watershed, two-thirds of the territory receives water that runs into the Madeira from more than 250 rivers, in the form of a funnel that drains into Brazil.

To that vastness is added the steep gradient. Three of the Madeira’s biggest tributaries – the Beni, the Mamoré and the Madre de Dios, which rises in Peru – emerge in the Andes mountains, at 2,800 to 5,500 metres above sea level, and fall to less than 500 metres below sea level in Bolivia’s forested lowlands.

These slopes “were covered by forest 1,000 years ago, but now they’re bare,” largely because of the fires set to clear land for subsistence agriculture, said Dourojeanni, an agronomist and forest engineer who was head of the Inter-American Development Bank’s environment division in the 1990s.

The result: torrential flows of water that flood Bolivia’s lowlands before heading on to Brazil. A large part of the flatlands are floodplains even during times of normal rainfall.

This year, 60 people died and 68,000 families were displaced by the flooding, in a repeat of similar tragedies caused by the El Niño and La Niña climate phenomena before the Brazilian dams were built.

Deforestation on the slopes of the Andes between 500 metres above sea level and 3,800 metres above sea level – the tree line – is a huge problem in Bolivia and Peru. But it is not reflected in the official statistics, complained Dourojeanni, who is also the founder of the Peruvian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature, Pronaturaleza.

When the water does not run into barriers as it flows downhill, what happens is “a tsunami on land,” which in the first quarter of the year flooded six Bolivian departments and the Brazilian border state of Rondônia.

The homes of more than 5,000 Brazilian families were flooded when the Madeira river overflowed its banks, especially in Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia, the state where the two dams are being completed.

BR-364 is a road across the rainforest that has been impassable since February, cutting off the neighbouring state of Acre by land and causing shortages in food and fuel supplies. Outbreaks of diseases like leptospirosis and cholera also claimed lives.

The dams have been blamed, in Brazil as well. The federal courts ordered the companies building the hydropower plants to provide flood victims with support, such as adequate housing, among other measures.

The companies will also have to carry out new studies on the impact of the dams, which are supposedly responsible for making the rivers overflow their banks more than normal.

Although the capacity of the two hydroelectric plants was increased beyond what was initially planned, no new environmental impact studies were carried out.

The companies and the authorities are trying to convince the angry local population that the flooding was not aggravated by the two dams, whose reservoirs were recently filled.

Such intense rainfall “only happens every 500 years,” and with such an extensive watershed it is only natural for the plains to flood, as also occurred in nearly the entire territory of Bolivia, argued Victor Paranhos, president of the Energia Sustentável do Brasil (ESBR), the consortium that is building the Jirau dam, which is closest to the Bolivian border.

The highest water level recorded in Porto Velho since the flow of the Madeira river started being monitored in 1967 was 17.52 metres in 1997, said Francisco de Assis Barbosa, the head of Brazil’s Geological Service in the state of Rondônia.

But a new record was set in late March: 19.68 metres, in a “totally atypical” year, he told IPS.

The counterpoint to the extremely heavy rainfall in the Madeira river basin was the severe drought in other parts of Brazil, which caused an energy crisis and water shortages in São Paulo.

A mass of hot dry air stationed itself over south-central Brazil between December and March, blocking winds that carry moisture from the Amazon jungle, which meant the precipitation was concentrated in Bolivia and Peru.

These events will tend to occur more frequently as a result of global climate change, according to climatologists.

Deforestation affects the climate and exacerbates its effects. Converting a forest into grassland multiplies by a factor of 26.7 the quantity of water that runs into the rivers and increases soil erosion by a factor of 10.8, according to a 1989 study by Philip Fearnside with the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA).

That means half of the rain that falls on the grasslands goes directly into the rivers, aggravating flooding and sedimentation.

The higher the vegetation and the deeper the roots, the less water runs off into the rivers, according to measurements by Fearnside on land with gradients of 20 percent in Ouro Preto D’Oeste, a municipality in Rondônia.

And clearing land for crops is worse than creating grassland because it bares the soil, eliminating even the grass used to feed livestock that retains at least some water, Dourojeanni said.

But grazing livestock compacts the soil and increases runoff, said Fearnside, a U.S.-born professor who has been researching the Amazon rainforest in Brazil since 1974.

In his view, deforestation “has not contributed much to the flooding in Bolivia, for now, because most of the forest is still standing.”

Bolivian hydrologist Jorge Molina at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, a university in La Paz, says the same thing.

But Bolivia is among the 12 countries in the world with the highest deforestation rates, says a study by 15 research centres published by the journal Science in November 2013.

The country lost just under 30,000 sq km of forest cover between 2000 and 2012, according to an analysis of satellite maps.

Cattle ranching, one of the major drivers of deforestation, expanded mainly in Beni, which borders Rondônia. Some 290,000 head of cattle died in January and February, according to the local federation of cattle breeders.

The excess water even threatened the efficient operation of the hydropower plants. The Santo Antônio dam was forced to close down temporarily in February.

That explains Brazil’s interest in building additional dams upstream, “more to regulate the flow of the Madeira river than for the energy,” said Dourojeanni.

Besides a projected Brazilian-Bolivian dam on the border, and the Cachuela Esperanza dam in the Beni lowlands, plans include a hydropower plant in Peru, on the remote Inambari river, a tributary of the Madre de Dios river, he said.

But the plans for the Inambari dam and four other hydroelectric plants in Peru, to be built by Brazilian firms that won the concessions, were suspended in 2011 as a result of widespread protests.

A local resident tries to save some of her belongings during the floods in Bolivia’s Amazon department of Beni. Credit: Courtesy of Diario Opinión

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Apr 4 2014 (IPS)

Unusually heavy rainfall, climate change, deforestation and two dams across the border in Brazil were cited by sources who spoke to IPS as the causes of the heaviest flooding in Bolivia’s Amazon region since records have been kept.

Environmental organisations are discussing the possibility of filing an international legal complaint against the Jirau and Santo Antônio hydroelectric dams built by Brazil, which they blame for the disaster that has already cost 59 lives in Bolivia and material losses of 111 million dollars this year, according to the Fundación Milenio.

Bolivian President Evo Morales himself added his voice on Wednesday Apr. 2 to the choir of those who suspect that the two dams have had to do with the flooding in the Amazon region. “An in-depth investigation is needed to assess whether the Brazilian hydropower plants are playing a role in this,” he said.

The president instructed the foreign ministry to lead the inquiry. “There is a preliminary report that has caused a great deal of concern…and must be verified in a joint effort by the two countries.”

Some 30,000 families living in one-third of Bolivia’s 327 municipalities have experienced unprecedented flooding in the country’s Amazon valleys, lowlands and plains, and the attempt to identify who is responsible has become a diplomatic and political issue.

Environmentalists argue that among those responsible are the dams built in the Brazilian state of Rondônia on the Madeira river, the biggest tributary of the Amazon river, whose watershed is shared by Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.

In Bolivia – where the Madeira (or Madera in Spanish) emerges – some 250 rivers that originate in the Andes highlands and valleys flow into it.

“It was already known that the Jirau and San Antonio [as it is known in Bolivia] dams would turn into a plug stopping up the water of the rivers that are tributaries of the Madera,” independent environmentalist Teresa Flores told IPS.

“Construction of a dam causes water levels to rise over the natural levels and as a consequence slows down the river flow,” the vice president of the Bolivian Forum on Environment and Development (FOBOMADE), Patricia Molina, told IPS.

Her assertion was based on the study “The impact of the Madera river dams in Bolivia”, published by FOBOMADE in 2008.

“The Madera dams will cause flooding; the loss of chestnut forests, native flora and fauna, and fish; the appearance and recurrence of diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, dengue; the displacement of people, increased poverty and the disappearance of entire communities,” the study says.

“Considering all of the information provided by environmental activists in Brazil and Bolivia, by late 2013 everything seemed to indicate that the elements for a major environmental disaster were in place,” Environmental Defence League (LIDEMA) researcher Marco Octavio Ribera wrote in an article published Feb. 22.

But Víctor Paranhos, the head of the Energia Sustentável do Brasil (ESBR) sustainable energy consortium, rejected the allegations.

The dams neither cause nor aggravate flooding in Bolivia “because they are run-of-the-river plants, where water flows in and out quickly, the reservoirs are small, and the dams are many kilometres from the border,” he told IPS.

In his view, “what’s going on here is that it has never rained so much” in the Bolivian region in question. The flow in the Madeira river, which in Jirau reached a maximum of “nearly 46,000 cubic metres per second, has now reached 54,350 cubic metres per second,” he added.

Moreover, the flooding has covered a large part of the national territory in Bolivia, not only near the Madeira river dams, he pointed out.

The ESBR holds the concession for the Jirau hydropower plant, which is located 80 km from the Bolivian border. The group is headed by the French-Belgium utility GDF Suez and includes two public enterprises from Brazil as well as Mizha Energia, a subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsui.

At the Jirau and Santo Antônio plants, which are still under construction, the reservoirs have been completed and roughly 50 turbines are being installed in each dam. When they are fully operative, they will have an installed capacity of over 3,500 MW.

Claudio Maretti, the head of the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Amazon Initiative, said “there is neither evidence nor conclusive studies proving that the dams built on the Madera river are the cause of the floods in the Bolivian-Brazilian Amazon territories in the first few months of 2014 – at least not yet.”

In a statement, Maretti recommended “integrated conservation planning, monitoring of the impacts of infrastructure projects on the connectivity and flow of the rivers, on aquatic biodiversity, on fishing resources and on the capacity of ecosystems to adapt to the major alterations imposed by human beings.”

The intensity of the rainfall was recognised in a study by the Fundación Milenio which compared last year’s rains in the northern department or region of Beni – the most heavily affected – and the highlands in the south of Bolivia, and concluded that “it has rained twice as much as normal.”

Several alerts were issued, such as on Feb. 23 for communities near the Piraí river, which runs south to north across the department of Santa Cruz, just south of Beni.

At that time, an “extraordinary rise” in the water level of the river, the highest in 31 years, reached 7.5 metres, trapped a dozen people on a tiny island, and forced the urgent evacuation of the local population.

The statistics are included in a report by SEARPI (the Water Channeling and. Regularisation Service of the Piraí River) in the city of Santa Cruz, to which IPS had access.

The plentiful waters of the river run into the Beni plains and contributed to the flooding, along with the heavy rain in the country’s Andes highlands and valleys.

The highest water level in the Piraí river was 16 metres in 1983, according to SEARPI records.

Flores, the environmentalist, acknowledged that there has been “extraordinarily excessive” rainfall, which she attributed to the impact of climate change on the departments of La Paz in the northwest, Cochabamba in the centre, and the municipalities of Rurrenabaque, Reyes and San Borja, in Beni.

Molina, the vice president of FOBOMADE, cited “intensified incursions of flows of water from the tropical south Atlantic towards the south of the Amazon basin,” as an explanation for the heavy rainfall.

She and Flores both mentioned deforestation at the headwaters of the Amazon basin as the third major factor that has aggravated the flooding.

In Cochabamba, former senator Gastón Cornejo is leading a push for an international environmental audit and a lawsuit in a United Nations court, in an attempt to ward off catastrophe in Bolivia’s Amazon region.

“The state of Bolivia has been negligent and has maintained an irresponsible silence,” he told IPS.

Molina proposes taking the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, to denounce the environmental damage reportedly caused by the Brazilian dams.

With reporting by Mario Osava in Rio de Janeiro.

Xokó chief Lucimario Lima searches for new livelihoods for his people, after the Itaparica dam on the São Francisco river cut them off from traditional agriculture and fishing. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FOZ DO IGUAÇU/PAULO AFONSO, Brazil, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

The Itaparica hydroelectric power plant occupied land belonging to the Pankararu indigenous people, but while others were compensated, they were not. They have lost land and access to the São Francisco river, charge native leaders in Paulo Afonso, a city in northeastern Brazil.

“We can no longer eat fish, but the worst loss was that of the sacred waterfall where we celebrated religious rites,” chief José Auto dos Santos told IPS.

Nearly 200 kilometres downriver, the Xokó indigenous community suffers from low water flow, the result of the large dams that have eliminated the regular seasonal rises in river level of the São Francisco, making it impossible to cultívate rice in the floodplains as before and drastically reducing the fish catch.

Similar effects are feared on the Xingú river in the Amazon, where the Belo Monte hydropower plant will divert some of the water in the stretch known as Volta Grande (Big Bend), affecting the native Juruna and Arara peoples.

Some 2,500 km further south, Ava Guaraní people living on the banks of the Itaipu reservoir, on the border with Paraguay, have become fish farmers to maintain their traditionally high fish consumption, given their growing population and the shortage of arable land.

In Brazil a generation of indigenous people grew up on still rather than running waters in the 1970s and 1980s, when the country built a large number of hydroelectric plants, some of them huge, like Itaipu which is shared with Paraguay, and Tucuruí in the eastern Amazon region, both of which opened in 1984.

In that period, five hydroelectric plants were built on the São Francisco river, which mainly crosses semi-arid territory, altering the flow of the river.

One of these facilities, Sobradinho, has a reservoir with an area of 4,214 square km, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, according to its state operator, Companhia Hidro Elétrica do São Francisco (São Francisco Hydroelectric Company) which has another 13 hydropower plants in Brazil’s northeast región.

When Sobradinho opened in 1982 it ended rice cultivation in the floodplains 630 km downstream in Xokó territory, local people told IPS.

The annual cycle of river level rises practically disappeared in the lower São Francisco after 1986, when the Itaparica dam and its 828 sq km reservoir, which regulates the flow below the Sobradinho dam, were created in the state of Pernambuco.

Deposition of the alluvial soil that fertilised ricefields and regularly renewed fish stocks in lagoons connected to the river by channels also came to an end.

“Without a flowing current, the river has lost force; it’s a shallow pond that can be crossed on foot,” said Lucimario Apolonio Lima, the 30-year-old Xokó chief who is unusually young to be the leader of an indigenous people. He told IPS that he is seeking a sustainable future for his people, who number just over 400.

He is encouraging bee-keeping and other alternative modes of production, fighting to revitalise the São Francisco and actively opposing Brasilia’s megaproject to divert water from this river to combat drought in the north.

“Before doing this, the river must be given life; sick people do not give blood for transfusions,” he said.

Raimundo Xokó, a 78-year-old shaman, told IPS, “My grandparents predicted that the banks alongside the São Francisco would die. I won’t see it, but my grandchildren will.”

The river banks are a thing of the past for the Pankararu who live five km from the huge Itaparica dam, in the state of Pernambuco. Their leaders feel they have been robbed.

“We have nowhere to fish. The company has taken our land and fails to recognise our legal rights to waterside land,”  shaman José João dos Santos, better known as Zé Branco, told IPS.

Former chief Jurandir Freire, known as Zé Indio, is fighting for indemnities totalling millions of dollars, because the native people were not paid reparations for the flooding of their lands, while municipal governments are receiving compensation and non-indigenous farmers have been resettled in newly built villages with irrigated land.

Zé Indio was imprisoned and lost his chief’s post for leading a 2001 protest that tore down electrical transmission lines from the hydroelectric plant that go through mountains in Pankararu territory without any payment being made.

The fertile land in a valley and on mountain slopes that retain humidity, in contrast to the surrounding semi-aridity, is another source of conflict. Since the Pankararu Reserve was demarcated in 1987, the native people have been pressuring the government to remove the non-indigenous farmers who have settled on the best land.

Isabel da Silva, who belongs to a non-indigenous farming family, pointed out that her family and others have lived in Pankararu territory for over a century. “My grandmother was born (in the reserve), and she died aged 91, five years ago,” she said.

“According to the law, we should leave, but that would be unjust,” said da Silva, who works for the Polo Sindical dos Trabalhadores/as Rurais do Submédio São Francisco, a family farmers’ union that achieved resettlement for nearly 6,000 rural families affected by the Itaparica dam.

There are 435 families who have been under threat of eviction for the past two decades. The measure has not yet been carried out for lack of land to resettle them on, according to the authorities.

The Pankararu Reserve covers an area of 8,376 hectares. In 2003 there were 5,584 members of this ethnic group there, according to the state Fundaçao Nacional do Indio (FUNAI – National Indigenous Foundation), responsible for protecting native peoples.

But thousands more have migrated to the cities, especially São Paulo, where they maintain their identity and meet up for indigenous religious rites and celebrations. If land were less scarce, many would return, said Zé Indio.

Land scarcity is also a threat to the Ocoy people, who live on the banks of the Itaipu reservoir. Here 160 families, totalling some 700 people, survive on barely 250 hectares, most of which are protected forests where agriculture is prohibited.

Fish farming, promoted by the Itaipu Binacional company, has emerged as a food-producing alternative in the light of dwindling traditional fishing reserves and the limitations to agriculture.

Indigenous people have excelled among the 850 fisherfolk who participate in the initiative, “perhaps because of their cultural relationship to water,” the company’s head of coordination and the environment, Nelton Friedrich, told IPS.

The Ocoy community harvests nearly six tonnes of fish a year from its 40 net cages, according to deputy chief Silvino Vass.

However, fish farming is not its major source of food and few individuals participate directly in this activity, according to a 2011 academic study by Magali Stempniak Orsi.

Besides, the indigenous people are overly dependent on the company, which supplies them with the fry and fish food, said Orsi, in whose view the project should promote greater community participation.

The Ocoy need assistance to meet their food needs, in contrast to two nearby Ava Guarani communities, who have more land donated by Itaipu Binacional, and grow more crops.

The support given by the Itaipu company to local indigenous people is an exception among hydroelectric plants. In addition to seeking development alternatives, it promotes sustainability in the river basins it manages with its “Cultivating Good Water” programme, which includes 65 environmental, social and productive actions.

A farmer proudly displays his watermelon crop in the municipality of Gloria, in Bahía state, where he was resettled after the family’s land was submerged by the Itaparica dam in Northeast Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
PETROLANDIA, Brazil , Jan 13 2014 (IPS)

Valdenor de Melo has been waiting for 27 years for the land and cash compensation he is due because his old farm was left underwater when the Itaparica hydroelectric dam was built on the São Francisco river in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast.

“I’ll get them, I’m confident,” he told IPS, although he is worried it will be after he retires as a farmer. But the 60-year-old at least has a solid brick house, where he lives with part of his family in a purpose-built farming village where all of the homes look alike.

The Melo family is one of the 10,500 families displaced in 1988, according to official data, by the reservoir of the Itaparica dam, which generates 1,480 MW of electricity.

But the real number of people forced off their land by the dam is nearly double that – close to 80,000 people, Russell Parry Scott, an anthropologist from the U.S., wrote in his book “Negociações e resistências persistentes”, published in Portuguese. The book is based on studies carried out at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil, where he is a professor.

Melo’s undying hope is based on the process that began with the construction of the dam and the 828-sq-km reservoir, which submerged four towns as well as riverbank fields along a 150-km stretch of the border between the states of Bahía and Pernambuco.

Unlike other hydropower plants in Brazil, the Itaparica dam triggered a successful, organised movement by the rural families who were displaced.

Rural workers associations from 13 municipalities came together in the Pólo Sindical dos Trabalhadores Rurais do Submédio São Francisco – the rural workers union of the lower-middle São Francisco river – and began to hold protests when construction began, in 1979.

The demonstrations drew up to 5,000 protesters, who blocked roads and occupied towns set to be flooded, as well as the offices of the construction company and the construction sites, in some cases for a number of days, defying harsh police crackdowns.

After a seven-year battle, the state-run São Francisco Hydroelectric Company, which owns 15 plants and supplies the Northeast with electricity, gave in and signed the 1986 Agreement to resettle rural families, pay them compensation for the property they lost, and provide them with monthly maintenance subsidies pending the first harvest on their new land.

Under the agreement, a total of 6,187 rural families were to be resettled in new homes, with up to six hectares of irrigated land and a more extensive area of dryland for each family.

The amount of land varied according to the number of family members who could work it, with women counting for 60 percent of the value assigned to men.

The Pólo Sindical took part in drafting the resettlement plan and kept up the pressure on the company and the government, as the programme suffered delays.

The end of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship and the return to democracy empowered social movements and favoured the Pólo Sindical’s triumph.

The more resistance the displaced small farmers faced, the more their tenacity grew. They sought to prevent a repeat of the abuses of earlier years, when thousands of Brazilians were forced off their land and out of their towns and only given meagre cash compensation, or none at all if they did not have legal title to their land, when other hydroelectric dams were built on the São Francisco river.

The rural families who accepted the resettlement agreement – 85 percent of those who were displaced, according to Scott – were relocated to 126 new “agrovilas” or farming villages scattered throughout several municipalities, with an average of about 50 families each.

“We managed to get part of the families resettled, but many left – they didn’t believe in our movement, they preferred to take the compensation payment,” and they moved to the impoverished outskirts of Brazil’s larger cities, the general coordinator of the Pólo Sindical, Adimilson Nunis, told IPS.

The agrovilas were built with the necessary infrastructure in sanitation, electricity, water, schools, administrative and health posts, he said. And the villages were placed around 12 areas of land that were to be irrigated, where each family had their most productive land.

But the irrigation equipment that would enable the families to start producing on the land did not start arriving until 1993, four years after cultivation was set to begin, and only in three of the 12 areas. Irrigated production began on six other areas within the following five years.

But the Melo family had the bad luck of being resettled in the Proyeto Jurante in the municipality of Gloria – one of the three agrovilas still under construction.

Most of the residents gave up and moved away. “In agrovila 5 only one family stayed, and only three stayed in agrovila 9,” waiting for the irrigation equipment, said Maria de Fátima Melo, Valdenor’s daughter, who hopes to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a farmer, once the irrigation project is set up.

But she got a municipal job as a nurse “just in case,” she told IPS.

The nine projects that have been operating since the 1990s have brought higher incomes and technological advances to 4,910 families, according to the São Francisco and Parnaíba valley development company, CODEVASF, the government agency in charge of managing the irrigation systems and providing technical assistance.

Gloria is now a watermelon-producing area. The resettlement project contributed to that when irrigation equipment was received in 1993 by 123 families relocated to three agrovilas, who also run an experimental centre, Dorgival Araujo Melo, a farmer and town councillor for the Green Party, told IPS.

“Irrigation is the solution for the Northeast, but with water-saving technologies” to adapt to the region’s semiarid climate, he argued.

He is proud of having managed, in his irrigation area, to replace wasteful sprinkler systems with drip irrigation tubing.

“Life improved with the new house, the nearby school, and the irrigated land,” said Ana de Souza Xavier. But, she added, she liked it better when the neighbours didn’t live so close together, and when she had a large yard “for raising goats and chickens and growing vegetables.”

Her husband Oswaldo Xavier, meanwhile, said he did not like the isolation of rural life.

The couple, whose three grown children are independent and have received higher education, were resettled in another agrovila near Petrolandia, a city built to replace another that was flooded when the reservoir was filled.

With three hectares of irrigated land and 22 hectares of dryland that they have been farming for the past 20 years, the family has prospered growing coconuts.

“Before this we suffered from the failure of crops of beans and watermelons,” her husband told IPS.

The experience in Itaparica, where nearly 20,000 hectares of irrigated land are worked by family farmers, represents an alternative form of agricultural development, different from the model of large-scale production of crops for both domestic consumption and export, requiring large investments and technologies that are unaffordable for small farmers.

But it is unlikely that Itaparica will inspire similar solutions for conflicts generated by other megaprojects, such as the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon rainforest.

As of 2010, the costs of the rural resettlement programme were equivalent to 85 percent of the total investment in the construction of the hydroelectric plant, and in 2014 will be equivalent to 100 percent, according to Brazil’s court of audit, which oversees the state’s financial administration.

Settling each family from the Itaparica dam cost four times more than in other government-backed irrigation projects, it reported.

The Paraná river, reduced in size by the concrete behemoth of the binational Itaipú dam. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FOZ DE IGUAÇU, Brazil , Dec 20 2013 (IPS)

As they build huge hydropower dams, the Brazilian government and companies have run into resistance from environmentalists, indigenous groups and social movements. But the binational Itaipú plant is an exception, where cooperation is the name of the game.

Involved in a total of 65 environmental, social and productive activities, the Cultivando Agua Boa (Cultivating Good Water – CAB) programme is led and supported by activists. Sectors of the government are considering using it as a model to be replicated in other major infrastructure projects, to mitigate impacts and conflicts.

Compared to what is happening in the rest of the hydroelectric dam projects, “it’s a stride forward,” said Robson Formica, head of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) in the southern state of Paraná, where the giant Itaipú hydropower complex is located on the border between Brazil and Paraguay.

Itaipú Binacional, the company that operates the hydroelectric plant, decided to guarantee efficient long-term electricity generation by caring for the Paraná river basin to ensure both the quantity and quality of the water. That has paved the way for cooperation with environmentalists.

More than 80 percent of Brazil’s electricity comes from its rivers, which means the country’s energy security depends on rainfall and on the best possible use of water.

Itaipú’s CAB programme was launched in 2003, two decades after thousands of rural and indigenous families were displaced in order to flood their land and fill the 1,350-sq-km reservoir. The dam is the world’s largest hydroelectric power producer.

Formica said CAB’s activities are “important, but limited and isolated.”

“They fail to establish a policy for local development, or for structural changes in the area in question,” added the head of MAB, which estimates that hydroelectric dams have displaced around one million people in Brazil.

The demand that the company take over functions that normally fall to the state has gained force as mega-dams and other infrastructure projects that drastically modify extensive areas of rainforest and other habitats mushroom around the country.

In addition, environmental laws are requiring compensation for damage caused.

In the case of Itaipú, that requirement is particularly justified. It is an unusual company, run by two different national governments, and it brought in revenue of 3.8 billion dollars in 2012.

The land and rivers where the complex operates along the border between Brazil and Paraguay contain the enormous hydroelectric plant, the reservoir, 104,000 hectares of land that is under environmental conservation, the University of Latin American Integration and the Itaipú Technological Park.

The CAB programme is active in 29 municipalities in Brazil covering a total surface area of 8,339 sq km, with one million inhabitants, along a 170-km stretch of the Paraná river and reservoir.

The programme’s 65 activities include assistance to indigenous communities, aquaculture, medicinal plants, biogas and environmental education – a concerted effort connected by the central aim of taking care of the water.

For example, CAB’s sustainable rural development activities revolve around organic agriculture as the top priority, aimed at reducing the pesticides polluting the reservoir.

“We started out with 186 families; today there are 1,180 families participating, and there are 2,000 organic gardens,” said Nelton Friedrich, Itaipú director of coordination and the environment.

The Itaipú Platform of Renewable Energies was also created, to protect the rivers from animal manure. The manure is converted into biogas, which generates electricity, thus creating another source of income for local farmers while curbing pollution of the water.

Family farming is the main livelihood around the reservoir, where there are millions of pigs, barnyard fowl and cattle on 26,000 smallholdings. If allowed to run into the water, the manure would cause excessive build-up of nutrients and the proliferation of aquatic weeds, which reduce the oxygen in the water.

This process is called eutrophication, explained Cícero Bley, Itaipú’s superintendent of renewable energies. “Pollution by organic waste is more common than pollution by toxic agrochemicals,” and in some cases makes constant cleaning of reservoirs necessary, he said.

It takes nearly 30 days to renew the water in the Itaipú reservoir, compared to much shorter time-frames in other dams.

On the Madeira river in the northern Amazon jungle state of Rondônia, where the Santo Antonio and Jirau hydroelectric dams just began to operate, it takes just two or three days to renew the water in the reservoirs, said Domingo Fernandez, Itaipú’s chief researcher on fish.

Clean-up and reforestation are thus clearly necessary along the banks of the reservoir to keep the water healthy and productive. The CAB programme planted more than 24 million trees around the Itaipú reservoir.

The initiatives follow a methodology that is also key, expanding the activities to the entire watershed, “because nature organises itself by watershed,” Friedrich said.

The model followed is based on the concept of shared responsibility, involving all local actors, from public and private companies to civil society and universities, with community participation – a kind of “direct democracy,” he explained.

To that end, management committees were created in the 29 municipalities, made up of an average of 57 representatives of different sectors, after numerous meetings were held for awareness-raising and debate on problems that have arisen.

The so-called water pacts, which are community commitments signed in ceremonies, drive the design and collective implementation of the plans and projects.

These initiatives point out a good path to follow, but are far from filling Itaipú’s social debt, said Aluizio Palmar, founder of the Centre for Human Rights and Popular Memory and a former secretary of the environment and communication in Foz de Iguaçú, the Brazilian municipality where the binational dam operates.

Construction of the hydropower plant between 1975 and 1983 displaced rural families, many of whom did not hold legal title to their land, which they needed to obtain compensation. The families joined the ranks of the people living in the favelas or slums, and the rates of violence in Foz de Iguaçú shot up, Palmar pointed out.

The monetary rewards, such as royalties, mainly benefited the city governments, which used the money to build shiny new government buildings and tourist attractions, while dedicating very little to cover the needs of the local population, Palmar complained.

Nevertheless, the situation at Itaipú stands in contrast with the situation in other parts of the country, especially on the São Francisco river, where there is a national clamour for the river to be cleaned up and revitalised, and where there is only an incipient programme coordinated by the environment ministry.

Five large hydroelectric dams with a total combined output of 10,827 MW – equivalent to 77 percent of Itaipú’s production – harness the increasingly scarce water in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast.

The main portion of the river crosses the impoverished region, and besides the frequent droughts, the São Francisco suffers from sedimentation and pollution caused by human activities, such as deforestation along the riverbank, the dumping of untreated sewage, and agribusiness projects irrigated with water from the river.

Mundurukú chiefs and warriors protest in Brazil’s lower house of Congress Tuesday Dec. 10, 2013. Credit: Luis Macedo/Acervo/Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 12 2013 (IPS)

It took them three days to make the 2,000-km journey by bus from their Amazon jungle villages.

The 10 Mundurukú chiefs and 30 warriors made the trek to the capital of Brazil to demand the demarcation of their territory and the right to prior consultation in order to block the Tapajós hydroelectric dam, which could flood several of their villages.

“No one from the government has come to talk to us,” Juarez Saw, the 45-year-old chief of Sawre Muybu, one of the affected Mundurukú villages, told IPS by phone from Brasilia. “For us, the land is our mother. It is where we live and raise our kids and grandkids. We have nowhere to go if the government forces us off.”

The Brazilian government, which is already building the Belo Monte mega-dam on the Xingú river in the northeastern Amazon state of Pará, also wants to construct another huge hydropower complex on the Tapajós river, in the same state.

The complex, in the heart of Amazonia and in an area of significant gold deposits, is to involve the construction of five dams in the Tapajós basin, with an estimated power potential of 10,700 MW.

Seven conservation units are green areas on the map, scattered between the three largest cities along the Tapajós river: Santarém (population 300,000); Itaituba (population 130,000); and Jacareacanga (population 40,000).

The 6,133 MW São Luiz do Tapajós hydropower dam will be the largest. The other dams planned in the complex are Jatobá, on the same river, and Jamanxin, Cachoeira do Caí and Cachoeira dos Patos, on the Jamanxin river.

The complex is to begin to operate between 2017 and 2020, according to the state-run company Empresa de Pesquisa Energética.

Some 13,000 Mundurukú Indians will be affected along the Tapajós river, and the project will also impact the Kayabi and Apiaká communities – bringing the number of indigenous people impacted by the dams to 20,000.

The Mundurukú chiefs and warriors came to Brasilia on Tuesday Dec. 10 and Wednesday Dec. 11 to demand that the government make faster progress demarcating their lands along the middle stretch of the Tapajós river.

Until the demarcation process has been completed, people from the villages along the middle stretch of the river run the risk of being displaced, with their land flooded.

On Tuesday, the indigenous demonstrators protested against the dams on the Tapajós and the nearby Teles Pires river, in the lower house of Congress and outside the attorney general’s office, where they called for the repeal of decree 303.

The decree, which the attorney general’s office issued in July 2012, created the regulations to be followed by public defenders and prosecutors in legal proceedings on the demarcation of indigenous land throughout the country, with the stated aim of ensuring legal stability.

But the decree also laid out the foundations for the state to install in the reserves equipment, communication networks, streets and the constructions necessary to provide public services like healthcare and education.

This aspect of the decree limits indigenous people’s control over who has access to and uses their territory, while infringing on their right to prior consultation about activities and economic projects carried out in their territories, according to the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI).

“We are once again shouting out against hydroelectric complexes in the region,” CIMI executive secretary Cleber César Buzatto told IPS from Brasilia. “It is a difficult situation – we perceive that the government has made a political decision not to demarcate any indigenous land.”

In his view, the conflict-ridden situation has been aggravated by “the inertia of the executive branch, which is not moving forward with the administrative procedures” set out by the constitution, such as demarcation of indigenous land and indigenous people’s right to prior consultation.

“We are confident in the native people’s power of resistance to defend and secure their rights. The central question is that the government must recognise these rights and demarcate the land of the Mundurukú along the middle stretch of the Tapajós river – the area that will be affected by the São Luiz hydropower plant,” Buzatto said.

The delegates came from different villages on the upper Tapajós river, where there is already one demarcated reserve, and on the middle stretch of the river, where the villagers do not yet hold legal title to their land.

“Our main struggle is for demarcation,” Saw told IPS. “We haven’t come to make threats. They don’t pay any attention to us – only when we come to Brasilia. It’s very tiresome to come here and return without any answers.”

His village, Sawre Muybu, was founded in 2008 and is home to 20 families – 150 people. It is located 50 km from Itaituba along the BR-230 trans-Amazonian highway – or over one hour away by river.

According to the chief, before the villages were founded along the middle stretch of the Tapajós, the Mundurukú lived in riverbank communities where they were losing their traditions and customs.

“We are in Brasilia to find out why the president of the National Indian Foundation [the government agency FUNAI] doesn’t want to sign the anthropological report,” he said.

Saw said the first anthropological report documenting the Mundurukú people’s roots on the land along the middle stretch of the Tapajós river was carried out in 2007, but was never delivered.

A new study had to be conducted, which has been ready since the middle of the year, waiting to be signed by FUNAI president Maria Augusta Assirati, in order for the demarcation to go ahead.

Saw said the people of Sawre Muybu found out in 2010 from Movimento Tapajós Vivo activists that the village could be flooded.

During their visit to the capital, the indigenous protesters stayed at a CIMI rural property 40 km outside of the city.

CIMI head Buzatto said “they came to us seeking support to demand these things from the government which, unfortunately, does not recognise that it is failing to respect the rights of the people in that region.”

In response to questions from IPS, FUNAI said the agency’s president had not planned on meeting with the Mundurukú chiefs and warriors but decided to meet with them on Wednesday as a result of their protests.

In May, the Mundurukú invaded and occupied for two weeks a plant of the company building the Belo Monte dam located 830 km by road from their territories, in solidarity with the people affected by that project, and to call for the suspension of the construction of hydropower dams on their rivers as well.

In June, they came to Brasilia to negotiate with the government. But because they did not agree to send only a limited group of delegates, the authorities sent two airplanes to transport 144 representatives.

Shortly afterwards, that same month, they took hostages – three biologists who were studying the local flora and fauna for the environmental impact studies for the dams. With that protest measure, they managed to delay the process until August. And before the study could get underway again, the government and FUNAI had to give prior notice to the indigenous community.

Belém do Pará, seen here from the Guamá river, is the epicentre of several Amazon rainforest megaprojects. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BELÉM, Brazil , Nov 5 2013 (IPS)

South America has gone from the world’s granary to the site of innumerable international infrastructure, energy and mining megaprojects. It is now facing a new dilemma: bolstering the economy with the promise of reducing inequality, in exchange for social and environmental costs that are taking their toll.

The old developmentalist model is back. South America has grown, and with that growth has come rising demand for energy, bridges, roads and minerals – just as demand has grown in other emerging economies that today see this region as the new frontier in terms of supplies of strategic raw materials.

Latin America “has difficulties in digesting its own development…what are the traps, what are the alternatives?” Maria Amélia Enriquez, assistant secretary of industry, trade and mining in the Brazilian state of Pará, told IPS.The region that will supply electricity to half of Brazil suffers frequent blackouts. -- Fabiano de Oliveira, an activist with the Movement of People Affected by the Altamira Dams

Pará, in the extreme north of Brazil, forms part of the Amazon rainforest, which is shared by Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Guyana, Venezuela and Surinam, where 320 major infrastructure works are planned for the next 20 years, according to João Meirelles, director of the Peabiru Institute, a nonprofit that seeks to generate value for the conservation of the biological and cultural diversity of the Amazon jungle.

Hydroelectric dams comprise more than one-third of all the megaprojects in Brazil. In the basin of the Tapajós river, a major tributary of the Amazon river that runs through the states of Pará, Amazonas and Mato Grosso, 42 dams are planned, including five large ones.

“We’re talking about an annual investment of at least 50 billion reals [some 23 billion dollars], dominated by at least 10 companies, including the Brazilian firms Camargo Corrêa and Odebrecht,” said Meirelles.

The mushrooming of megaprojects can be seen throughout the region – ports, roads, freeways, waterways, mining projects, agribusiness and steelworks.

“The old hasn’t died and the new hasn’t been born yet,” said Alfredo Wagner, coordinator of the New Social Mapping of the Amazon Project, referring to the economic model inspired “in the 1930s” and oriented today towards “the international commodities market.”

These issues were discussed at an Oct. 26-28 workshop on megaprojects for journalists organised by the IPS news agency and the U.S.-based Mott Foundation in Belém, the capital of Pará.

Men peeling cassava at the Ver-o-Peso market in Belém, Brazil. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

The region’s new transnational corporations, such as Brazil’s Odebrecht, are key players in the boom in megaprojects in the region, which receive financing from both private and public sources, in particular Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES).

In Venezuela, the company is involved in three major infrastructure projects.

The Tocoma dam is the last of the four hydropower plants to be built to harness the waters of the Caroní river, the second-biggest river in Venezuela, in the south of the country.

The Nigale suspension bridge over Lake Maracaibo in northwest Venezuela, to be completed in 2018, will be the third-longest in Latin America, and the project includes the construction of 11 kilometres of roads and railways and three artificial islands.

The Mercosur bridge, which will be the third bridge over the Orinoco river, is planned for 2015, to link southern and central Venezuela. It will be the second-largest bridge in Latin America.

According to the Venezuelan government, 30 major infrastructure works are in progress, as part of the 2013-2019 “Fatherland Plan”, with a total investment of 80 billion dollars.

“Are we looking at the evolution of late capitalism?” Wagner wondered.

In Brazil’s Amazon region, the highest-profile and most controversial megaproject is also in Pará: the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which will flood more than 500 square km of jungle and displace over 16,000 people.

The dam, on the Xingú river, will have an installed capacity of 11,233 MW and is considered essential by the government to supply Brazil’s energy needs.

A large part of the energy generated by the dams in the Amazon rainforest will be used by industry. Several industrial corporations are interested in investing in the construction of more dams, according to Meirelles, like the U.S.-based aluminium giant Alcoa and Brazil’s Votorantim Group, which has operations in the cement and concrete, mining, metallurgy and pulp and paper industries.

“The question is who ends up with the natural wealth extracted from the Amazon, and who benefits from these projects,” said Gilberto Souza, professor of economy at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA).

The expansion of the Vila do Conde port in the Pará city of Barcarena will improve the transport of aluminium and its raw materials, as well as the export of grains from central Brazil. But it will also displace several riverbank neighbourhoods.

With the new hydroelectric dams, Pará will produce half of the energy consumed in this country of 200 million people. A large proportion of the minerals produced in the state, which is rich in minerals but has the worst development indices in the country, goes to China, the world’s biggest consumer of iron ore, Souza noted.

The population of Altamira, the closest city to the Belo Monte dam, grew 50 percent in two years. As a result, the deficit in healthcare, education and housing grew, and violent crime and prostitution soared.

The area is facing problems like increased deforestation, the deterioration of water quality, and a reduction in the river populations of fish, a staple of the diet of local communities.

Ironically, the region that will supply electricity to half of Brazil suffers frequent blackouts, Fabiano de Oliveira, an activist with the Movement of People Affected by the Altamira Dams, told IPS.

Oliveira and other people living in communities affected by megaprojects complain that they have not been duly consulted.

Resistance movements are growing, but they are facing “one of their biggest contradictions: many of the people who are being relocated are at the same time employed” on the Belo Monte construction site, he explained.

Similar resistance has emerged against two major works in Chile.

The HidroAysén project in the Patagonia wilderness in southern Chile involves the construction of five large hydropower dams in the most biodiverse area in the country.

The 2,000-km transmission line required to carry electricity to the mining industry in the north will cross eight of the country’s 15 regions. But it will not supply any of them with energy.

Work on the project has been suspended by court rulings.

Further north, the Pascua Lama gold and silver mine, owned by Canada’s Barrick Gold corporation, straddles the border between Chile and Argentina in the Andes. Numerous lawsuits over water pollution and the destruction of two glaciers led to a legal decision in April to temporarily halt construction.

The company announced on Oct. 31 that it would indefinitely suspend development of the Pascua Lama mine, due to cost-overruns and a sharp drop in the price of gold.

In the Amazon region of Beni in Bolivia, indigenous communities are waiting for information on the impacts of the construction of the Cachuela Esperanza hydroelectric plant, with an installed capacity of 990 MW and a cost of two billion dollars, which will export electricity to Brazil.

Environmentalists warn that the flooding of some 1,000 square km of land will cause environmental imbalances, besides displacing local communities.

In Pará, José Etrusco, the manager of environment, safety and health in the Albras aluminium corporation, said big hydropower dams like Belo Monte represent the best cost-benefit ratio, even if they entail the relocation of native communities.

“We have to do it, or we’ll be left in the dark,” he argued.

In Colombia, the construction of a set of tunnels at the Alto de La Línea Andes mountain pass is generating another kind of controversy.

The tunnels are essential to creating an east-west road connection, from Venezuela through Bogotá and on to Buenaventura, Colombia’s only Pacific ocean port.

The route is the backbone of Colombia’s international trade, and provides a key outlet for Venezuela to the Pacific.

But while the first tunnel is being completed, environmentalists have pointed out that since 1999, the National Geological Service has been warning about the danger of eruption of the nearby Machín volcano – something that wasn’t even taken into account in the environmental impact assessment.

Forest engineer Paulo Barreto of Brazil’s Imazon institute said the question is “what is the real cost of these works?”: the environmental costs, such as the aggravation of climate change; socioeconomic costs, like the concentration of rural land ownership; and social problems in newly urbanised areas.

“Who is going to pay the bill?” asked Barreto.

UFPA professor of agrarian law José Benatti raised another question: who will employ the workers who have been drawn from other regions by the megaprojects, once the work is done?

Pedro Bara, with WWF Brazil, proposed a methodology for analysing the long-term impacts of major infrastructure works as a whole, rather than on a project by project basis.

As a foundation for that analysis, the WWF Living Amazon Initiative’s Infrastructure Strategy, which Bara heads, carried out an exhaustive study of the different Amazon ecosystems that must be conserved in order to prevent the biome from disappearing.

That big-picture view, said Bara, should include regional planning, especially in sensitive shared areas like the Amazon rainforest.

With reporting by Estrella Gutiérrez (Caracas), Constanza Vieira (Bogotá), Marianela Jarroud (Santiago) and Franz Chávez (La Paz).

The Itaipú hydrower complex, an example of bilateral energy integration that cannot go beyond the borders of Paraguay and Brazil. Credit: Darío Montero/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Oct 31 2013 (IPS)

Energy integration efforts in Latin America have been made in fits and starts, even though many clearly understand that the only way to solve the region’s energy shortages and high costs is by working together.

Experts who spoke to IPS agreed that the main difficulties in achieving energy integration lie in the differences between national energy supply systems. In the region there are countries with centralised state management and others with mixed public-private systems.

Other factors that affect integration are differences in fuel prices, uncertain availability of natural gas supplies, and socio-environmental conflicts over major energy projects such as mega-dams.

To move forward towards integration, they say, commercial and technical regulations must be adopted for a viable international market for electricity, to operate interconnected systems, harmonise national regulations, and coordinate planning for connected systems, in order to develop a regional market.

Common criteria for reliability standards, rationing priorities, and distribution of congestion pricing revenues also have to be defined.

The first in-depth study on these questions in Latin America was carried out in 1964, when the Commission for Regional Electricity Integration (CIER) was founded. It is currently made up of 10 countries, including the founders – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay – as well as Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and seven companies.

CIER has carried out more than 20 studies that have outlined the concrete possibilities for unifying the region’s power grids.

But Latin America is far from achieving energy integration, Oscar Ferreño, CIER international coordinator for generation, told IPS.

Among the factors standing in the way of integration are a lack of political will and the privatisation of a number of major power production and distribution companies and oil companies since the 1990s.

Ferreño pointed out that there is one interconnected area, among the founding members of the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (Venezuela recently became the fifth full member).

But he warned that “there is a natural barrier that is difficult to overcome: the Andes mountains.”

At any rate, several bilateral or multilateral initiatives for interconnection have been studied, and some of them could be implemented, he added.

One example is the electric power interconnection between Uruguay and Brazil, which involves a 420-km power line with a capacity of 500 MW and a high-voltage direct current converter station, that is to come onstream in mid-2014.

The Brazilian government is also discussing with Argentina and Paraguay the construction of a 321-km power line with a capacity of 2,000 MW to interconnect two binational hydroelectric dams: Yacyretá, shared by Argentina and Paraguay, and Itaipú, between Brazil and Paraguay.

The problem is that the Itaipú contract prohibits the sale of energy to a third country.

In the Andean region, meanwhile, two projects are still only on paper. One arose from a 2007 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) study on the complementarities of energy resources in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

The other is the Andean Electric Interconnection, which would involve the five Andean countries and has the backing of the Inter-American Development Bank.

But the idea of establishing a regional energy network focuses on tapping the oil reserves of Argentina and Venezuela, the gas reserves of Peru and Bolivia, the hydroelectric systems of Chile and Brazil, and the region’s solar and wind power potential.

Ferreño said “energy integration is fundamental,” principally because of the variation in non-conventional renewable energies, like solar and wind power, which have a vast potential in Latin America.

“Wind can blow in the south at one point and not in the north, or it could be cloudy, so integration facilitates the homogenisation of the production of the different natural energies, which is essential,” he said.

The director of the TNS Latam consultancy, Fernando Meiter, agreed that “regional energy integration is still far off.

“It is impossible if there is no framework so that if one country has a surplus, it can be given to a neighbour. That’s basically the problem,” he said.

“Argentina has several gas pipelines to Chile and one to Uruguay, which are currently not in use. In the short term, I don’t think integration will be achieved,” Meiter said.

Argentina exported natural gas regularly to Chile until 2006, when it began to sell only small quantities because it had to cover its own domestic needs first.

Chile, even without resolving the question of the diversification of its energy mix, could turn to Bolivia, another large gas supplier. But there is constant diplomatic tension between the two countries over Bolivia’s long-standing demand for an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, which it lost to Chile in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific.

Bolivia currently exports significant volumes of natural gas to Argentina.

According to the Latin American Energy Organisation (OLADE), regional energy consumption amounted to 1,073 terawatt hours in 2010 at high prices, both for residential and industrial uses.

Official figures indicate that in 2011, Chile was the country with the sixth highest prices for the industrial sector in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), at 154 dollars per megawatt hour.

Meiter noted that one of the benefits of energy integration is the ability to negotiate prices as a bloc.

“For example, if Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay could jointly purchase natural gas from any of the Arab producers, if they went together to negotiate volumes, the prices would come down,” he said.

In his view, the Andes are not an obstacle for integration, “because the infrastructure is already there. That means it’s a question of political will,” he said.

Pedro Bara explains to indigenous people and activists the tool developed by the WWF to guide negotiations over hydropower projects in the Amazon. Credit: Courtesy of Denise Oliveira/WWF Living Amazon Initiative

By Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

In the war over major hydropower dams in the Amazon jungle, everyone loses – even the winners who manage to overcome the opposition and build them, but who suffer delays, costs that are difficult to recoup, and damage to their image.

“The polarisation impoverishes the debate on the use and preservation of natural resources,” Pedro Bara, head of the WWF Living Amazon Initiative’s Infrastructure Strategy, said in this interview with IPS.

WWF stands out for seeking negotiated solutions to the dispute between economic questions and the preservation of nature. In the case of hydroelectric dams, it is calling for dialogue to resolve the confrontations between the business and government interests involved and a diverse array of opponents, including affected communities, and social, indigenous and environmental movements.

The aim is to outline a broad strategy for the Amazon rainforest, overcoming the project-by-project focus that is not based on any proven parameters.

To that end, the Brazilian chapter of WWF developed a tool based on scientific studies, which makes it possible to have an idea of what is needed to preserve water and biodiversity and keep the Amazon alive.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: How can nature be protected in the Amazon jungle in the face of encroachment by hydropower dams, cattle, soybeans, logging and mining companies, and roads?

A: Six years ago, we decided to ask ourselves what we would need to preserve of the Amazon rainforest from here on out. It’s not 100 percent of what’s left, but it can’t all be used for development either.

If we were completely familiar with the area’s biodiversity, it would be easy to define priority areas. But we don’t have enough information on biodiversity in the Amazon. I think we know about only 40 percent of the total, at the most.

We were forced to draw broad conclusions about biodiversity based on the variety of environments. Different environments will have different species. You make approximations. We have conducted several tests in Madre de Dios [a region in southeastern Peru] on how to plan the conservation of water in data-poor areas.

We concluded that by cross-referencing slope with surface run-off, water flows, vegetation and sources of water, you can get a good explanation of the variety of aquatic species and classify rivers by segments. We expanded that model to the entire Amazon basin.

Q: Did you choose Madre de Dios because the ecology there is representative of Amazonia?

A: No, it was because it contained different characteristics. If it was homogeneous it wouldn’t be useful. We had to work with a broad diversity of environments in order to test several models and select the best to apply in the entire Amazon region, where we identified 299 kinds of aquatic ecosystems.

At the same time, the [U.S.-based environmental conservation group] Nature Conservancy and NatureServe [an international network of biological inventories] developed a terrestrial ecological classification based on landforms, soil type, vegetation and climate.

They identified 423 terrestrial ecosystems in Amazonia. Conclusion: this biome is more diverse from a terrestrial than an aquatic point of view.

This is also an approximation, because there are many animal species that move around a lot.

But with the two models I can decide what to preserve. If I can preserve a representative, functional and resistant sample of the 299 aquatic and 423 terrestrial classifications, theoretically I’m preserving the heterogeneity and biodiversity of the Amazon.

Q: But how are the priority areas chosen?

A: By the best cost-benefit ratio, keeping the area to a minimum size based on a purely economic decision.

Q: How are cost and benefit measured?

A: Benefit is opportunity: for example, protected reserves and indigenous lands, where the cost of preserving is lower. Cost is threat: deforestation and the advance of the agricultural and livestock frontier are the terrestrial costs.

Within an ecosystem classification, the model chooses the area most distant from those threats, which drive up conservation costs.

It’s a software that assembles puzzles of thousands of micro-basins, each of which has its attributes, such as belonging to this or that aquatic or terrestrial classification, the proximity of roads, or the current level of degradation.

It avoids red zones, where costs are high, and selects the sample of ecosystem in a protected area. It makes thousands of cross-references to find the best solution.

We didn’t invent anything; we use methodologies from scientific research. The national water agency [ANA] carried out a similar project, the “strategic map of the rivers on the right side of the Amazon river”, which gave us a sense of certainty.

But there are cases where I don’t have options. Aquatic ecosystem 214, for example, only occurs in one spot. If it is affected, it would definitely be lost. It is irreplaceable. And there are many irreplaceable areas.

Q: So what can you preserve?

A: We set a target: preserving 30 percent of each kind of ecosystem. But it’s only an exercise; the actual decision depends on who is at the table discussing the parameters.

Thirty percent of the aquatic ecosystems, plus 30 percent of the terrestrial ecosystems, theoretically adds up to 60 percent. But because there is some overlap, it’s actually 55 percent. That’s reasonable, because today 40 percent is covered by nature reserves and indigenous territories. It’s an arbitrary number, but it has some technical value.

Q: An index to mark the negotiation?

A: That’s where we started: we reached a definition of what we want, in response to the challenge of the hydropower plants.

If we agree that an area must be preserved for the future, it has to have a free connection with the main channel – the Amazon river – since the watershed is unified. Conservation depends on the connectivity of waterways. If the power industry wants to dam all of the rivers [in a watershed], the future of a living Amazon would be compromised.

But everything is negotiable. Our tool offers the possibility of dialogue, not a pat solution. It’s a platform of strategic evaluation to look at the big picture, contextualise projects and reach decisions based on better information. Tomorrow someone could introduce the question of archaeological sites, of quilombos [communities of descendants of escaped African slaves], etc.

Q: How did the government react to this proposal?

A: The reception is always good, until a specific interest is touched. For us, the ideal was to discuss the entire Amazon basin, but we didn’t manage to organise a forum.

The path to that opened up thanks to a December 2010 inter-ministerial decree, which created a working group to analyse environmental and socioeconomic aspects, seeking to subsidise the selection of areas to exploit for hydropower. That was what we had wanted.

The Energy Research Company [EPE] of the Ministry of Mines and Energy wanted to learn about our tool. We trained people in the ministries. They carried out their analysis.

But two years have already gone by. That’s why we decided to go public with our proposals, before the [hydroelectric] projects on the Tapajós river progressed any further.

Q: And have there been any interesting reactions in the private sector?

A: The directors of an international bank praised our ideas, telling us that they’re scared to death of getting involved in a project and later having to face protests outside the doors of the bank. The BNDES [Brazil’s National Bank for Economic and Social Development] won’t be able to finance everything on its own.

Q: Can you cite a case where this tool pointed to better alternatives?

A: On the Teles Pires river [a tributary of the Tapajós], I found out that they were thinking of building a single dam, bigger than the current one, the Teles Pires dam, without the other two that had been planned, the São Manoel and Foz do Apiacás. It might have been a better alternative, with greater potential and a smaller cumulative impact.

The river has a natural barrier and the problem of connectivity is not such a major issue. There is a myth that small hydroelectric dams have a smaller impact, but if there is a string of them, the aquatic ecosystem is broken up more.

Excerpt:

A major diversion project threatens to choke Mongolia's Orkhon River, the longest in the country. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
SELENGE PROVINCE, Mongolia, Jul 19 2013 (IPS)

Tsetseghkorol, a Mongolian herder, stares out nostalgically at the Orkhon River, the longest in the country.

“In 1992, the river used to be wide, deep and clean,” she says. “Now it is very polluted and small.”

Sitting with her neighbour Dashdavaa in a ‘ger’, a traditional Mongolian yurt used by herders across this vast Central Asian country, Tsetseghkorol tells IPS she has lived alongside the 1,124-km-long Orkhon for 40 years, raising five children and a herd of livestock with little more than the natural bounty of the river basin.

Dashdavaa, also a herder, is in her 60s, with nine grown children. She moved closer to a tributary of the Orkhon River in 1992 after the collapse of socialism in Mongolia, when she lost her job as a kindergarten teacher.

Like many Mongolians at the time, she returned to her pastoralist roots to support her large family, and now views this river as a critical lifeline.

Though shrinking from climate change, the Selenge river basin, comprised in part by the Orkhon River, is still lush compared to the 72 percent of the country facing desertification.

Covering 343,000 square km, the basin provides a livelihood to 55 percent of Mongolia’s population of 2.9 million people.

As idyllic as this valley seems, a threat lurks not too far away: the potential destruction of this ancient way of life by the proposed Orkhon River Diversion Project, which, according to the NGO Rivers Without Boundaries, is funded by the World Bank.

Currently in its feasibility-study phase, the project is a government scheme to build a dam several kilometres upstream from Tsetseghkorol and Dashdavaa, 35 km southwest of the northern city of Bulgan, in order to pump water through a 900-km-long underground pipeline into the parched Southern Gobi Region, which could run out of groundwater in the next 10 years unless additional water sources are promptly located.

A website detailing the Orkhon project revealed there is a possibility of building a reservoir with a capacity of 700 to 800 million cubic metres, as well as a 25-to-30-megwatt (MW) hydropower station on the river.

While this project intends to draw just five percent of the Orkhon River’s total supply, experts say the percentage volume will vary depending on the time of year: the river is always much thinner during the dry season, while most of the surface water is frozen throughout the winter months (November through April); so the river will face a particularly heavy assault during those periods of scarcity.

“Given that the Orkhon, including Tuul [its tributary] is already the most exploited river basin in Mongolia, even an additional five-percent withdrawal may cause serious problems,” Eugene Simonov, a conservation science specialist at Pacific Environment and coordinator of the Rivers without Boundaries coalition, told IPS.

According to a report from Mongolia’s Water Centre, the water will travel south through eight population centres, with the final destinations being the massive government-owned Tavan Tolgoi coal mine and Oyu Tolgoi copper mine.

The latter, located 350 km from the capital, Ulaanbaatar, is expected to increase the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 30 percent and is currently valued at 6.6 billion dollars.

Mining is taking a heavy toll on the region, with herders in the Gobi desert reporting that dug wells, their traditional water sources, are drying up as a result of the mines, which guzzle an estimated 191,230 cubic metres of water every day, far surpassing the combined consumption of livestock herds (31,600 cubic metres) and residents (just 10,000 cubic meters), according to the 2010 World Bank water assessment for the Southern Gobi Region.

Enkhat, director of the ministry of environment and green development, told IPS that the water shortage is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed “immediately”, citing the diversion project as a step in the right direction.

While the ministry has identified herders and locals in the Gobi desert as the main beneficiaries of the project, feasibility reports show the mining industry is expected to swill no less than 50 percent of the water, while 30 percent will go to crop irrigation and only 20 percent to livestock, household use and environmental purposes.

Thousands of herders rely on rivers to water their livestock herds. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

This ratio bodes badly for an agricultural region that supplies 40 percent of the country’s wheat needs and where 100,000 residents are dependent on the river to water their crops and their roughly 1.3 million head of cattle.

Furthermore, the project will solidify the region’s relationship with miners by soliciting funds and contracts from extraction companies in order to meet the project’s exorbitant costs.

Initially the cost of conveyance was found to be too high compared to the cost of accessing existing groundwater sources, making the project “unfeasible”, but rising prices of groundwater over the last few years have made surface water projects much more attractive.

From about eight cents per cubic metre, the cost of groundwater has risen to 1.07 to 6.74 dollars for a single cubic metre, depending on the quality of the water source.

The price increase, implemented to prevent industrial overuse of the scarce resource, represents a major setback for the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, jointly owned by the Canadian corporation Rio Tinto and the Mongolian government, at 66 percent and 34 percent respectively.

The original mining contract stipulated that Rio Tinto would draw its water needs from a saline aquifer that the project’s researchers located 35 km from the construction site in 2003.

The mining ministry confirmed to IPS that Rio Tinto had been granted the use of 20 percent of this aquifer for a 40-year period.

But according to Oyu Tolgoi’s water resources principal advisor, Mark Newby, the price hike has resulted in the company footing a water bill that is “40 times higher than previously agreed.”

Higher prices have also made alternative sources, such as water drawn from alluvial deposits, cost ineffective. Classified as ‘groundwater’ because it resides under the Orkhon riverbed, water extracted from alluvium would cost three times as much as surface water.

According to Simonov, this encourages reservoir construction, which obstructs the natural flow of the river and harms the fragile ecosystem.

The Taishir Dam, for instance, constructed against the wishes of the community in western Mongolia in 2008, has negatively affected indigenous nomads, endangered species like the Pallas’s Fish Eagle, and led to the untimely deaths of livestock by drying out the Zavkhan River.

“Giant infrastructure projects for which international finance institutions are providing soft loans are the best option for corporations or contractors and lazy development organisations that derive a benefit from them. They [the projects] usually serve the interests of large businesses, not the local population,” Simonov said, adding, “Prestige Group [the Mongolian engineering firm in charge of the project] has always favoured in-stream reservoir construction, the most costly and environmentally destructive option.”

Dashdavaa and Tsetseghkorol looked stricken when asked for their opinion on the proposed project. Sitting in their gers without a television, they have been unaware of the broadcast advertisements proclaiming that water will be brought to the Gobi from the Orkhon.

These humble subsistence herders thought the project, already on the table for a few years, had been cancelled in response to the local outcry.

Though they understand that people need water in the Gobi, they said that if the project goes through, “We will become like the Gobi ourselves.”

*The story moved on Jul. 19, 2013, incorrectly stated that the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine plans to take advantage of the Orkhon River Diversion Project. Mark Newby, water resources principal advisor for the mine, informed IPS that Oyu Tolgoi will not utilise water from the river diversion project for its operations.

Diversifying the energy mix and the spectre of energy shortages in Chile are central issues in the campaign for the primary elections this Sunday Jun. 30, when presidential candidates will be nominated for the Nov. 17 elections.

Particularly controversial is the HidroAysén project, which aims to build five large hydropower plants on the Baker and Pascua rivers, 1,600 kilometres south of Santiago, in Chile’s Patagonia wilderness region.

River in Chilean Patagonia. Credit:John Spooner/CC BY 2.0

This is the most controversial project in recent years, raising hackles among local people and environmental activists on the one hand, while being presented as a concrete solution to the energy crisis forecast for the coming decade by its proponents, on the other.

Centre-left presidential hopeful and former president Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010), who is in the lead in voter intention polls, said on Jun. 23 that “HidroAysén is not viable, so in my view it should not go forward.”

Potential centre-right presidential candidate Andrés Allamand, of National Renewal (RN – Renovación Nacional), agreed that the project “is dead.”

HidroAysén, owned by Colbún, a company controlled by the Chilean consortium Matte and the European firm Endesa-Enel, is designed to occupy an area of 5,910 hectares.

Its power plants would have a planned total capacity of 2,750 MW for the country’s central grid, which supplies electricity to 90 percent of the country’s 17 million people.

The proposed investment is about 3.2 billion dollars and includes a transmission line 1,912 km long – the longest in the world – from the city of Cochrane in Patagonia to Santiago.

According to environmentalists, the area where the HidroAysén complex is to be built is a natural heritage of humanity site because of its wealth of biodiversity, and it is one of the greatest fresh water reserves on the planet.

“We oppose the hydropower megaprojects, not only for numerous environmental reasons, but also because of the tremendous social harm they will do,” activist Patricio Rodrigo, executive secretary of the Patagonia Defence Council, a coalition of community groups which mobilised 120,000 people in a march against HidroAysén in 2011, told IPS.

“Chile and the world are changing,” Rodrigo said. “We see what is happening in Brazil. The companies will have to adjust to developing projects that are consistent with society’s goals, and not impose aims that the citizens do not agree with.”

But Daniel Fernández, the executive vicepresident of HidroAysén, warned that the country was courting an energy crisis in the future on a scale “much greater” than this project.

Chile has an installed capacity of 17,000 MW, 74 percent in the central grid, 25 percent in the northern grid, and the rest in medium-sized grids in the southern regions of Aysén and Magallanes.

There are nearly 40 hydropower stations in the country, and 10 projects are in the stage of environmental assessment.

However, only 40 percent of the energy mix is provided by hydropower. The rest is supplied by thermal power stations burning polluting fossil fuels, 97 percent of which have to be imported.

Due to the shortage of energy sources, the cost of production per MW/hour in Chile is one of the highest in Latin America, at over 160 dollars, compared to 55 dollars in Peru, 40 dollars in Colombia and 10 dollars in Argentina, Fernández said.

According to the National Energy Commission, an additional 7,000 to 8,000 MW need to be generated over the next few years, and by around 2030, demand will have tripled, Fernández said.

The HidroAysén project was approved in May 2011, and is awaiting a decision about its future by the Council of Ministers for Sustainability, which is reviewing 38 appeals received by the Environmental Assessment Service.

Fernández said: “No human intervention, least of all an energy project, can avoid some environmental impact.” He added that at the moment there is no other project that will produce as much energy as HidroAysén, with less impact.

He told IPS that the delay by the Council of Ministers in deciding the future of the project was “a blow to the country’s environmental institutions,” and he called on the political system to establish a “state energy policy” so that investors can “know what to expect.”

“If the message Chile sends is that there is uncertainty over project approval, a risk of getting endlessly bogged down in the courts, and un-met deadlines, then we are not attractive to investors,” Fernández said.

“There are already some investors who no longer want to invest in Chile,” he said, adding that “it is a legal and administrative obligation” for the government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera to make its position clear on the future of HidroAysén.

In Rodrigo’s view, the threats of an energy crisis and investor flight are part of “a terror campaign on the part of the electricity monopoly,” made up of Endesa, Colbún and Gener.

He maintained that in this South American country “there are enough energy projects to avert any crisis.”

Morevoer, he repudiated the bill on electricity concessions presently before parliament, which it is said will grant concessions in perpetuity to the electricity companies.

When it comes to the positions of Bachelet and other candidates, Rodrigo said: “the former president is listening to the voice of the people.”

“There is consensus among political leaders that Patagonia is more valuable, from the environmental, social and economic point of view, as natural heritage than if it is filled with dams,” he said.

Fernández, on the other hand, believes that Chile’s energy problem is so vast “that to oppose Hidroaysén is a reductionist stance.”

The Indian Defence Force rescues a pilgrim after the floods in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

On the outskirts of Rudraprayag, a town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand whose many temples draw tourists and Hindu pilgrims with magnetic force, visitors often stop for a meal at a popular hotel built right on the river Alakananda.

One of the two head streams of the Ganga, the holy lifeline of India that gushes from the Gomukh snout of the massive Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas, Alakananda is revered as a goddess.

A night in the hotel is cheap, and budget tourists from home and abroad come here for the breathtaking view from balconies overlooking the mountains and glaciers that comprise 90 percent of the state.

As idyllic as it sounds, this hotel unwittingly played a role in one of the worst natural disasters the state has ever seen when, on Jun. 15, flash floods caused by a cloudburst and glacial leaks swept thousands of unsuspecting pilgrims away in what scientists are now referring to as a ‘Himalayan tsunami’.

The state’s chief minister said Thursday that the death toll could exceed 1,000, with 300 bodies found just this morning buried beneath silt beside the largest temple in the town of Kedarnath.

Countless tourists were trapped for days in pitiable conditions until the Indian Defence Force came to their rescue in one aerial sortie after another.

Thousands are still missing and many towns and pilgrimage sites remain inaccessible, as the raging waters carried away whole strips of roads, along with homes, shops and hapless victims.

As the government scrambles to complete a haphazard rescue operation, environmentalists are taking a step back, pointing out that the disaster was not simply a freak natural hazard but a result of unbridled development in the Land of the Gods.

Hydropower projects 

For years, a booming tourist industry, made possible by thousands of illegally constructed guesthouses, has spawned massive hydroelectric power projects on the rivers, while other infrastructure development designed to accommodate hoards of visitors has proceeded at a steady clip, putting undue stress on this fragile ecological zone.

Scientists also say the damming of the Ganga, riverbed encroachment and mining activities are wreaking havoc on the region.

“There (have been) no credible environmental or social impact assessments for hundreds of projects,” Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, tells IPS.

According to Mallika Bhanot, member of Ganga Ahvaan, a public forum to save the holy river, about 244 dams are being constructed along the water channel, while only three were cancelled after a 100-km stretch, from the glacial mouth of Gomukh to Uttarkashi town, was declared an eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) in December 2012.

“Even that notification by the government in New Delhi has been opposed by the Uttarakhand government,” Bhanot tells IPS, despite the fact that it was designed after a thorough assessment of the topography, and with the intention of preserving human lives in a landslide-prone zone.

Frightening footage of the recent disaster captured multi-storey buildings collapsing into the river like a pack of cards, while cars, bridges and shops were easily swept into the vortex. Activists say all of this could have been prevented if the state government had heeded the call to cease construction and encroachment on the riverbed.

The New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has also traced the link between the disaster and the manner in which development has been carried out in this unique region.

Acknowledging the economic importance of energy generation, CSE Director-General Sunita Narain questions whether or not “the Central or state government ever considered the cumulative impact of the hydropower projects on the rivers and the mountains.”

“Currently, there are roughly 70 projects built or (slated to be built) on the Ganga, expected to generate some 10,000 megawatts (MW) of power,” she told IPS.

She referred to this model as “bumper to bumper development”, with one project immediately following another.

Diversion channels and reservoirs will affect 80 percent of the Bhagirathi, the Ganga’s second head stream, and 65 percent of the Alakananda, Narain stressed. During the dry season, large stretches of the river will be completely dry.

Such activities, she said, are fantastically lucrative for developers, making it next to impossible for small environmental groups to have their voices heard.

“There is a strong construction lobby in Uttarakhand,” said Bhanot, adding that many politicians’ election funds come directly from hydropower projects.

Green alternatives abound, including electricity generation using smoke from burning pine needles to propel turbines; biomass; or mini hydro plants, capable of generating two MW of power. But these, less profitable schemes do not sit well with corporations.

Narain says this particular disaster cannot be attributed solely to climate change, but the growing trend of intense and extreme weather events – particularly a heavier, more unpredictable monsoon – is undeniable.

With climate change widely acknowledged to be the result of the burning of fossil fuels and emission of excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is clear that the ongoing tragedy is human-induced, Thakkar said.

The glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) that poured down the mountains bringing boulders and rocks is just another sign that the delicate balance of nature’s forces has been disrupted – and Uttarakhand is paying the price.

Regulation required

Tourism may form the backbone of Uttarakhand’s economy, but it is now clear that visitors and pilgrims number too many: according to government data, 42.2 million domestic tourists and 227,000 foreigners flocked to Uttarakhand in 2012.

Those numbers are expected to double by 2017, with the state gearing up to welcome 77.7 million domestic travelers and nearly 400,000 foreigners.

These arrivals will be accompanied not only by increased human waste and pollution from transport, but also by endless construction of hotels and the justification of ever more mega development projects.

Experts like Thakkar insist that the sector be regulated based on a proper scientific assessment of the region.

This will not be easy, since tourism brings much-needed revenue to the state. The government estimates that each tourist spends an average of 38 dollars a day, much of which goes directly to the government via entrance fees for religious sites.

But while this income from “religious and cultural tourism is a lifeline for many, it will not be sustainable…(unless) all development activities take into account the vulnerability of the area,” Thakkar says.

The youngest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas are already prone to erosion, landslides and seismic activity.

“Development cannot come at the cost of the environment in any region of the country; but particularly not in the Himalayas,” Narain stressed.