Scientists warn that water risk threatens iconic heritage sites such as the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Sep 3 2025 (IPS)

From Zimbabwe’s ‘The Smoke that thunders,’ Victoria Falls, to the awe-inspiring Pyramids in Egypt and the romantic Taj Mahal in India, these iconic sites are facing a growing threat – water risk.

Several World Heritage sites could be lost forever without urgent action to protect nature, for instance, through the restoration of vital landscapes like wetlands, warns a new report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) following an analysis indicating that droughts and flooding are threatening these sites.

World Heritage sites are places of outstanding universal cultural, historical, scientific, or natural significance, recognized and preserved for future generations through inscription on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

About 73 percent of the 1,172 non-marine World Heritage sites are exposed to at least one severe water risk, such as drought, flooding, or river or coastal flooding. About 21 percent of the sites face dual problems of too much and too little water, according to an analysis using WRI’s Aqueduct data.

While the global share of World Heritage Sites exposed to high-to-extremely high levels of water stress is projected to rise from 40 percent to 44 percent by 2050, impacts will be far more severe in regions like the Middle East and North Africa, parts of South Asia, and northern China, the report found.

The report highlighted that water risks were threatening many of the more than 1,200 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Taj Mahal, for example, faces water scarcity that is increasing pollution and depleting groundwater, both of which are damaging the mausoleum. In 2022, a massive flood closed down all of Yellowstone National Park and cost over USD 20 million in infrastructure repairs to reopen.

River Flooding is affecting the desert city of Chan Chan in Peru. According to WRI’s Aqueduct platform, the UNESCO site and its surrounding region in La Libertad face an extremely high risk of river flooding. By 2050, the population affected by floods each year in an average, non-El Niño year in La Libertad is expected to double from 16,000 to 34,000 due to a combination of human activity and climate change. In an El Niño year, that increase may be much higher.

In addition, the biodiversity-rich Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, the sacred city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico, and Morocco’s Medina of Fez are facing growing water risks that are not just endangering the sites but also the millions of people who depend on them for food, livelihoods, or a connection to their culture or who just enjoy traveling to these destinations, the report said.

Straddling the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Victoria Falls was inscribed on the World Heritage site in 1989 for its vital ecosystem and essential source of livelihoods for thousands of people, and a major tourism drawcard.

Despite its reputation for massive cascading water, Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls has faced recurring drought over the past decade and at times dried up to barely a trickle. The report stated that the rainforest surrounding Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls is home to a rich diversity of wildlife and plants.

According to WRI, Victoria Falls experienced droughts as recently as 2016, 2019, and 2024. Research on rainfall patterns near Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls shows that the onset of the rainy season, normally in October, is arriving later in the year. That means in a drought year, it takes longer for relief to arrive, and the longer the drought continues, the more it affects the people, crops, and economy around it.

An Aqueduct analysis found that Victoria Falls ranks as a medium drought risk, below the more than 430 UNESCO World Heritage Sites that rank as a high drought risk. This is primarily because relatively low population density and limited human development immediately surrounding the site reduce overall exposure.

“However, the site faces increasing pressure from tourism-related infrastructure development, and data shows the probability of drought occurrence ranks high—a finding reinforced by the many recent droughts that have plagued the region,” said the report. “Climate change is not only expected to make these droughts more frequent, but recovery is expected to last longer, especially in places that aren’t prepared.

“The time between droughts may not be long enough for the ecosystem to recover, which is particularly concerning for Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls.”

Restoring nature, a solution to plugging water risks

The report recommends swift action to restore vital landscapes locally that support healthy, stable water and investment in nature-based solutions like planting trees to restore headwater forests or revitalize wetlands to capture floodwaters and recharge aquifers. Political commitment is key to making this happen.

Besides, countries have been urged to enact national conservation policies to protect vital landscapes from unsustainable development globally, and water’s status as a global common good needs to be elevated while equitable transboundary agreements on sharing water across borders are established.

Zimbabwe hosted the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Ramsar Convention in Victoria Falls under the theme ‘Protecting Wetlands for our Common Future.’ The protection of global water resources is now more urgent.

“You will find the political will to invest in nature exists all over the world,” Samantha Kuzma, Aqueduct Data Lead at the World Resources Institute, told IPS. “Dedicated communities are finding ways to protect and restore vital landscapes like wetlands. The problem is that these efforts are piecemeal. Globally, we are not seeing the political will at the scale needed to achieve real, lasting change.”

The world needs to mobilize up to $7 trillion by 2030 for global water infrastructure to meet water-related SDG commitments and address decades of underinvestment, according to the World Bank. Currently, nearly 91 percent of annual spending on water comes from the public sector, including governments and state-owned enterprises, with less than 2 percent contributed by the private sector, the World Bank says, pointing out the importance of firm commitment to reforming the water sector through progressive policies, institutions, and regulations, and better planning and management of existing capital allocated to the sector.

“We are at the point where inaction is more costly than action,” Kuzma told IPS, emphasizing that the world must do a better job of understanding water’s fundamental role in sustaining economies because its value is everywhere and invisible until it’s at risk.

“Take UNESCO World Heritage Sites, for example. Their ecological and cultural worth is priceless, and in purely pragmatic terms, they’re often the linchpin of local economies,” said Kuzma. “Any closure or damage will send immediate ripple effects through communities. It is safe to say that globally, we are falling short when it comes to protecting nature. But to change course, we must first understand why.”

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The Great Barrier Reef is home to over 1,500 species of fish. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, May 14 2013 (IPS)

Mining and port development coupled with decreasing water quality along Australia’s north-eastern coast are threatening the continent’s World Heritage-listed tourist drawcard, the Great Barrier Reef.

An assessment report of the reef by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has said the lack of “firm and demonstrable commitment” by either the Australian federal or the Queensland state government to limit port developments near the reef “represents a potential danger to the outstanding universal value of the property.”

Spread across an area of 348,000 square kilometres, the Great Barrier Reef includes about 2,500 individual reefs and over 900 islands and is home to breeding colonies of seabirds and marine turtles, snubfin dolphins and the humpback whale.

“Will we sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef and accept dangerous climate change as the inevitable cost of propping up just one industry?” - Greenpeace Senior Campaigner Dr. Georgina Woods
Australia’s resources boom, combined with increasing demand for coal in Asian markets, is attracting billions of dollars worth of investments in mining projects here. About 43 industrial development proposals are under assessment for their potential impact on the world’s most extensive coral reef ecosystem.

“With a number of major development (projects) coming up for approval in the coming weeks and months, the Australian government is playing a risky game if it continues to approve them because it may force the World Heritage committee to place the reef on their list of shame,” World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Spokesman Richard Leck told IPS.

Since 2011, UNESCO and the IUCN have expressed serious concerns about the management of the world heritage area.

“Australia has clearly ignored the recommendations. The federal government continues to approve new developments with no long-term commitment to restricting industrialisation to the existing footprint. The Queensland government has also weakened some of the laws that protect the reef from development and land clearing,” Leck told IPS.

WWF estimates that the clearing of tens of thousands of hectares of vegetation along rivers leading to the reef, and allowing dredge spoil to be dumped in coastal waters will have a significant impact on the protected site, which contains 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 types of mollusc, about 240 species of birds, and several sponges, anemones, marine worms and crustaceans.

The reef waters also provide major feeding grounds for threatened species, and hosts one of the world’s largest populations of the dugong.

According to Australian Marine Conservation Society’s Great Barrier Reef Campaign Director Felicity Wishart, “The development of port infrastructure and increased shipping movements require the dredging of millions of tonnes of seabed, often seagrass meadows which are the breeding and feeding areas for turtles, dugongs and other marine life.

“The sediments stirred up during dredging can travel tens of kilometres away, settling on coral ecosystems and plant life. This can damage or destroy vital wetlands, fish breeding grounds and other coastal habitats,” Wishart told IPS.

Moreover, environmentalists are concerned that increased shipping will aggravate the risk of oil spills in the reef. About 4,000 ships plow the Great Barrier Reef annually and this number is expected to grow to 6,000 ships by 2020.

To protect the healthiest and most pristine section of the reef from terrestrial threats, especially new ports and mining development, The Wilderness Society is seeking a World Heritage nomination for the Cape York Peninsula, located on the northern tip of Queensland.

“This would rule out the Balkanu Corporation’s Wongai coalmine proposal, which would open up new areas to development, and Rio Tinto’s South of Embley bauxite mine, which would require 900 shipping movements through the reef between the Weipa mine and the processing facility at Gladstone,” Gavan McFadzean, Wilderness Society’s northern Australia campaigner, told IPS.

According to projections by the Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics, coal exports from Australia, already the world’s leading exporter, will roughly double in a little over a decade. Over the past 10 years black coal exports have increased by more than 50 percent. Major Asian economies like Japan, China, the Republic of Korea, India and Taiwan account for 88 percent of all black coal exports.

Greenpeace Senior Campaigner Dr. Georgina Woods summed up the situation with a simple question: “Will we sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef and accept dangerous climate change as the inevitable cost of propping up just one industry?”

Research commissioned by Greenpeace estimates Australia’s coal export expansion is the second biggest of 14 proposed fossil fuel enterprises that will push the world beyond agreed global warming limits. Coral reefs around the world are unlikely to survive if global temperatures increase by 1.5 degrees. “Right now, we’re heading decisively for four degrees of warming,” Woods told IPS.

CEO of the Sydney-based Climate Institute, John Connor, warned that the Great Barrier Reef is under threat from climate change, both from ocean acidification and from increasingly severe storms, but said Australia had taken some important steps to reduce emissions by putting in place the necessary carbon laws.

“Australia’s carbon price mechanism regulates emissions by limiting them not just pricing them. It will reduce at least 12 million tonnes of carbon pollution a year and has the potential to reduce 1.1 billion tonnes by 2020,” Connor told IPS.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Labour Government has also announced it will pour 27 million dollars into improving the quality of water flowing into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. It will help reduce the run-off from farms causing coral bleaching and algae growth, which smothers seagrass beds and coral reefs.

Larissa Waters, senator for the Australian Greens, has introduced a bill in the Senate to adopt the World Heritage committee’s key recommendations and she is calling on both the Liberal and the Labour Party to support it.

“The government must stop putting the interests of big mining companies ahead of the reef and place a moratorium on all further developments until the joint government strategic assessment is finished in 2015 and also stop allowing new ports in pristine areas,” Waters told IPS.

Experts are worried about the economic impact of destruction to the reef, which contributes 822 million dollars a year to the national economy and supports about 60,000 jobs. Recent polling shows that 91 percent of Australians think protecting the reef is the most important environmental issue in 2013.

It took six years for a dedicated team of scientists from the Wildlife Institute of India, wildlife officials from six Indian states and officials from the federal ministry to secure international protection for one of India’s most precious biological reserves.

India’s Western Ghats mountain range is the birthplace of 62 rivers. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

Finally, earlier this month, the United Nations’ Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) granted World Heritage Site status to India’s Western Ghats, which many believe to be the crown jewel of India’s biodiversity reserves.

The mountain range, which geologists estimate to be more than 150 million years old – older even than the Himalayas – runs along the country’s western coast and is the thought to be the last vestige of all representative ecosystems in the subcontinent.

Hosting six different types of forest ecosystems, including thick wet evergreen rainforests, moist deciduous forests, pine forests, grasslands and Sholas, or valley forests, the site is home to the largest floral and faunal diversity in the world.

More than 62 rivers originate in the Western Ghats, serving the water needs of at least 74.85 million people around the Indian Ocean rim in 28 countries.

The forests here are also crucial catchment areas for monsoon rains. The mountain range runs parallel to India’s west coast for a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometres, averaging a height of 1,200 metres above sea level. Hardly anywhere else in the world is there a more conducive rainfall laboratory occurring so naturally. Small wonder, then, that 17 countries in Asia supported India’s nomination of the Western Ghats for World Heritage Site protection.

Grasslands that flank the valley forests harbour rare wildlife like king cobras, Malabar pit vipers, cobras, kraits and pythons. At least 508 species of birds, 156 species of reptiles, 334 species of butterflies, 120 species of mammals, 121 species of amphibians and 218 species of fish are endemic to the Ghats.

The cloud-kissed mountains harbour more than 4000 species of endemic flora; a single cave in the Kudremukh forest sprouts three rivers – the Tunga, Bhadra and Netravati.

A total of 39 sites are earmarked for UNESCO inscription, effectively protecting their fragile conservation status with solid international monitoring.

“The 39 sites cover an area of some 8000 square kilometres, or roughly five percent of the 140,000 square kilometres of the Western Ghats,” Dr. V.B. Mathur, the dean of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), told IPS.

The Ghats also contains one elephant reserve, 11 tiger reserves, 12 wildlife sanctuaries, seven national parks, eight reserved forests, four eco-sensitive ranges, and two wildlife-dense forest divisions.

Better protection, less development?

Conservationists who have long lamented the weakness of environmental protection and conservation laws in India were quick to praise UNESCO’s decision.

But the move is now facing stiff opposition from political leaders and businessmen, whose plans for anthropocentric development of the reserve will effectively be thwarted.

In the past, mine pits have been “excluded” from the environmental mandate, allowing mining to continue in enclosures where conservation laws were effectively rendered defunct.

With international observation it will no longer be possible to manipulate conservation laws to allow activities like mining, dam construction, hydel power projects or highway construction.

The governments of Karnataka and Kerala in particular are strongly against additional protection of the mountain range, with the Karnataka Legislative Assembly going so far as to adopt a resolution to oppose the UNESCO tag, while local politicians in both states insist that existing laws are adequate to safeguard the biodiversity hotspot.

“Conservation of the Ghats should come from concern within rather than attention from the outside,” Dr. K.N. Ganeshiah of the University of Agricultural Sciences told IPS. “The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel set up by the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests has done a far more meaningful job of advising what we need to do and those recommendations are more inclusive and elaborate than what the World Heritage tag can offer,” he stressed.

He is not alone in his trepidation. The Ghats’ rich terrain and sprawling river systems make ideal real estate for development projects involving hydel power and mining. The forest minister of Karnataka bemoaned the fact that “even development of eco tourism will be affected” by UNESCO’s strict conservation standards.

International monitoring required

That it took an Indian Supreme Court ruling to halt construction of the seventh dam across the Kalinadi River that meanders through virgin jungle in the Western Ghats speaks volumes about the appalling lack of political will for conservation.

Similarly, it was the Supreme Court that put a halt to iron ore mining in the Kudremukh forest in 2000, tipping the scales against economic profits in favour of long-term protection of the fragile ecosystem, which contains the largest valley in all of Asia and is home to the endemic rainforest species Poeciloneuron indicum.

If not for a Supreme Court verdict in 1996, mining in the Dandeli Anshi Tiger Reserve in the Western Ghats would never have ceased.

Such interventions have repeatedly vindicated conservationists’ calls for international monitoring of the site.

Experts argue that the presence of at least 50 dams in the mountain range also shed light on government indifference to conservation.

Manoj Kumar, a forest officer in the Dandeli Anshi Tiger Reserve, explained that apart from eating up large swathes of forest, dams also block wild animals’ migration paths. “This could lead to inbreeding, which results in local extinction of some species,” he said.

UNESCO protection crucial for tigers

The mountain range is also a sanctuary for a slowly growing tiger population, though the endangered animals are far from being entirely safe.

Signs of increasing tiger presence have prompted calls for notification of the Kudremukh forests as a tiger reserve. A future Kudremukh Tiger Reserve could create a corridor for wildlife migrating from the nearby Bhadra Tiger Reserve.

According to a 2010 study by the WII, the Western Ghats hosts almost a third of the tigers in India. “Around 534 (tigers currently live here), (indicating) a rise of about 32 percent since 2006,” the report stated.

A previous report by the WII identified one corridor in the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, as one of the potentially sustainable landscapes for long term in situ tiger conservation.

Apart from tigers, other carnivores in these thick jungles include leopards, black panthers and the Indian wild dog. Rare and endangered wildlife include the lion-tailed macaque and fresh water otters and dolphins.

A black-coated feline in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve is yet to be identified by the scientific community. However, tribals and communities dwelling in the forest fringes have established that a black skinned carnivore, distinct from the Black Panther, has roamed the forests for centuries.

(END)

The World Bank has voted to approve funding credit for a major transmission line that would link Kenya to the controversial Gilgel Gibe III dam site in southern Ethiopia, pushing back against months of calls by local and international rights and environmental groups to keep out of the project.

For many observers, the move, announced Thursday, is complicated by the fact that the bank has already refused to fund the Gibe III dam itself, citing a lack of transparency. The African Development Bank and the European Investment Bank have similarly pulled out, although the project is going forward due to backing by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

“For us, the World Bank’s double standards are unacceptable,” Ikal Angelei, from Friends of Lake Turkana, a group of local communities that would be affected by the dam, told IPS.

“If the dam did not meet standards earlier, how can they fund what is produced by the dam?” he asked, calling Thursday’s news a “blow” to local communities.

Others have accused the World Bank of turning a blind eye to accusations of abuse and environmental concerns surrounding Gibe III in order to be able to fund the transmission line, for which the bank is offering 684 million dollars.

“Under its own safeguard policies, the bank is obligated to apply its policies not only to the direct area but also to associated facilities,” Jessica Evans, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“To do this, it must undertake its own due diligence to determine potential power sources and apply their safeguards to the main power sources – and Gibe III is, according to the bank, one of the power sources.” 

Construction on the dam, which is on the Omo River and at around 240 metres would be Africa’s highest dam, has gone on since 2006, overseen by an Italian company. It is currently about halfway complete and is tentatively expected to be completed by 2014, while the transmission line could be up and running by 2018.

The benefits of Gibe III, and its downsides

When completed, the installation should produce around 1,870 megawatts of electricity, increasing Ethiopia’s production capacity so significantly that the country will not be able to use all of the energy generated.

The newly approved 1,000-kilometre transmission line, while meant to service several power projects, will thus be a critical component of Gibe III, allowing Ethiopia to sell the power to its neighbours, particularly power-strapped Kenya. Proponents say the project will do much to bring affordable power to broad swathes of populations throughout of East Africa that currently lack electricity.

Yet the Gibe III project has run into longstanding and widespread opposition, including even from those who could benefit from its electricity. Critics have warned that insufficient attention has been given to fears of the dam’s environmental and social impacts.

In 2011, the Kenyan Parliament passed a resolution urging the government to demand that the project be shelved pending additional investigation.

The same year, the U.N.’s World Heritage Committee noted its “utmost concern” over the dam’s potential impact on the downstream Lake Turkana, which is surrounded by lands protected as World Heritage sites. The committee urged Ethiopia “to immediately halt all construction on the Gibe III dam”.

Survival International, an advocacy group for tribal communities worldwide, has warned that the dam’s impact on the Omo River’s seasonal flooding would threaten up to 200,000 people in Ethiopia and Kenya as “subsistence economies … collapse”.

Despite these concerns, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has made construction of Gibe III an issue of both national and personal pride, stating that he would see the project through “at any cost”.

Circuitous funding?

To be clear, few observers are accusing the World Bank of direct involvement in the displacement of indigenous communities, the negative impacts on fragile ecosystems, or the other points of criticism that have been levelled at the Ethiopian government’s handling of the Gibe III construction.

Rather, the issue at stake is whether the bank can be seen to have done due diligence on a transmission line that will, in the end, comprise a critical component of the overall feasibility of a highly contentious project.

On Friday, in a collective release, five international civil society groups warned that the bank is “lowering its standards” by backing the transmission project without first addressing the criticism surrounding Gibe III.

“Financing the transmission line sends a signal to Ethiopia that it can ignore massive impacts of damming its rivers, and still get rewarded,” Joshua Klemm, Africa manager of the Bank Information Centre, a World Bank watchdog based here in Washington, said in the statement.

Bank officials, meanwhile, see the transmission line as the first step in a much broader plan to interconnect the electrical grids of East Africa. Estimated to cost around 1.3 billion dollars, the so-called Eastern Electricity Highway Project is aimed at benefitting some 212 million people in five countries.

The transmission line would eventually be used for several current and future power plants in Ethiopia, in line with the government’s plans to expand Ethiopian production to 37,000 megawatts – still below the country’s estimated hydropower potential of 45,000 megawatts, according to the bank.

“While it is true that Gibe III will contribute energy to the national grid, our analyses show that the interconnector line would be economically viable without Gibe III,” a World Bank spokesperson told IPS.

“Ethiopia will benefit through the sale of energy to Kenya, which faces severe power shortages, and is among the five African countries considered likely to achieve middle-income status in the next decade, provided it can grow at six percent annually, significantly expand its electricity supply and improve its transport links.”

In addition, the transmission line’s flow is bidirectional, allowing Ethiopia to import energy as required. The bank suggests that such infrastructure flexibility will increase the involved countries’ resilience in the face of future climate change-related uncertainty.

“Inter-country power sharing is vital for energy security, reducing energy costs, promoting sustainable and renewable power generation, and better protecting the region’s environment,” the bank spokesperson said, “thereby paving the way for more dynamic regional cooperation between the countries of East Africa.

Currently, the bank says, only about a third of Africans have access to electricity, including just a quarter of Ethiopians.

The village of Hasankeyf lies above the Tigris River, whose flow has carved out rock formations over the course of millenia. Credit: Jay Cassano/IPS

By Jay Cassano
HASANKEYF, Turkey, Jun 10 2012 (IPS)

Hasankeyf, a small village in southeastern Turkey, has been under threat for 15 years. Home to approximately 3,000 people, the site is one of the oldest continuously inhabited human settlements, with an archaeological record going back at least 9,500 years.

Now, the Ilisu Dam – part of a massive hydroelectric project undertaken by the State Hydraulic Works – will flood Hasankeyf and the surrounding region, effectively washing away millennia of history.

In addition to destroying a historical site, which includes vestiges of every empire that ever inhabited Mesopotamia, the dam will also cause immense ecological harm to the Tigris River valley.

Derya Engin, who staffs the Hasankeyf office of the Nature Society, a Turkish NGO, told IPS that numerous endangered species will lose their habitat if the dam is built.

“The Tigris is the only untouched river ecosystem in Turkey and it is vital that it remain that way,” she warned. “It is well-known that dams dramatically change the climate of entire regions. This dam will destroy the habitats of fish, birds, and plant life, some of which are unique to the Tigris valley.”

Construction of the dam began in earnest in 2008, but plans for its implementation date back even further.

The dam was originally conceived in the 1950s as part of a plan, called the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), intended to develop the infrastructure of largely rural and Kurdish southeastern Turkey. Since 1997, several European finance consortia have attempted to fund the project, only to withdraw support before anything concrete materialised.

The European banks and companies pulled out in large part due to massive solidarity campaigns against the dam in their respective home countries. In 2009, the German, Austrian and Swiss governments revoked the export credit guarantees to the final consortium because the Turkish government failed to meet the ecological, social, and cultural heritage standards set by the World Bank.

For a while, activists in Turkey and throughout Europe believed they had won the fight and that construction of the dam would stop. To their surprise, construction is continuing to this day.

It was later revealed that the Turkish government had quietly secured funding from two of the country’s largest private banks, Akbank and Garanti, making the project still viable.

Water Wars

The Turkish government’s reasons for pressing ahead with the controversial project are not what one might expect. Projections place the amount of hydroelectric power the dam will produce at less than 2 percent of Turkey’s total energy needs. Not an entirely insignificant amount but certainly, according to various sources, not enough to justify the destruction of an entire ecosystem, invaluable cultural heritage, and the livelihoods of several thousand people.

The Turkish government has openly proclaimed that the main function of the dam system is to bolster the country’s counter-insurgency strategy against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which mobilises from the mountainous Iraqi-Turkish border. Together, the strategically placed dams created by GAP will form a massive wall of water close to Turkey’s border with Iraq.

Having flown through the Hasankeyf for millenia, the Tigris has created a vast canyon topography that is not only visually spectacular but also provides necessary cover for militants. In addition to raising the water level of the Tigris, flooding from Ilisu Dam will spill over into nearby canyons that are currently dry.

With canyons filled and massive lakes created where rivers once flowed, the terrain will become impassable by foot.

Furthermore, the effects of the dam will extend beyond Hasankeyf, well across national borders. By virtue of being upstream from Iraq and Syria on both the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, Turkey effectively controls the flow of water southward.

With the Euphrates already heavily dammed, the Syrian and Iraqi governments have raised serious concerns about dam projects on the Tigris. Twice the region has been on the verge of water wars, once in 1975 and again in 1990. Restricting water flow from the Tigris could prove to be a tipping point in the incendiary region.

Activists believe that, ultimately, the dam will turn water into a political tool both inside and outside Turkey’s borders. “We know that the dam is really about security,” Mehmet İpek, a young local activist, told IPS.

Down the road, Mehmet Ali, a shopkeeper selling tourist souvenirs, lamented the imminent loss of his home. “They are condemning a place like this, with no equal in the world, for a dam that will only operate for 50 years.”

An invaluable site

Today there is little recourse left to stop construction. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) could theoretically put a hold on the project. A case was brought before the court in 2006 but rejected on the grounds that the ECHR protects human rights, not cultural heritage, ignoring the approximately 35,000 people who will all be forced to give up their way of life if the dam is constructed.

A new case is being submitted to the ECHR after a Turkish regional court rejected it this week. Locals hope that it will work, but are not deceiving themselves. They have learned from experience how determined the state is to continue with the project.

Ömer Güzel, a shop owner and local activist in Hasankeyf, told IPS that at one point the villagers held protests every week. “It didn’t accomplish anything,” he said. “In the end the dam is still being built right now.”

The government has kept the construction site, 16 kilometres downstream from Hasankeyf, under heavy security. However, sources with access to the site, who spoke to IPS on the condition of anonymity, claim that the dam is already half completed.

There is still a chance that the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) might list the area as a World Heritage site, effectively guaranteeing its protection.

To qualify for World Heritage status, a site must meet one of 10 criteria for outstanding universal value in an area of cultural or natural significance. Hasankeyf, as the only site in the world that meets nine of the 10 criteria, is an exceptional candidate for inclusion.

Unfortunately, that fact alone is not enough to be listed. “In order to be included as a World Heritage site, the country in which the site is located must submit an application to UNESCO. The Turkish government has not done this,” Engin explained.

A UNESCO delegation previously visited Hasankeyf and, upon taking stock of the area, urged the Turkish government to apply. The implication was that if Turkey applied, Hasankeyf would be accepted.

“But the government does not want to protect this area, so why would they apply? The dam project is too important to the state,” Engin pointed out.

(END)