Energy versus Environment: Three Gorges Dam

Is the cost too high?
Straits Times 5 Jan 08;

The Three Gorges Dam project promises clean power and flood control, but is its impact on the environment and human settlement justifiable?

China correspondent TRACY QUEK finds dissatisfaction and uncertainty among dam officials, environmentalists, academics and the people who have left their homes to make way for the rising waters

FOR millennia the Yangtze River has run untamed, cutting a jagged path from the mountains of Tibet through the heart of China and on to the country's eastern coast.

Along its marathon 6,300km course lies one of China's most stupendous landscapes: a 200km stretch of three towering gorges hewn out of the rock by the rushing waters.

Throughout history, this spectacular scene has inspired poetry, music and paintings.

In recent years, however, the region known as the Three Gorges has been capturing the world's imagination for vastly different reasons.

With the Chinese government's decision 15 years ago to build the world's largest hydroelectric dam in the Yangtze's middle reaches, the Three Gorges region has come to symbolise the anxieties of a fast-modernising China. In particular, it reflects the tension between economic interests and a desire for environmental and social balance.

The dam will be an environmental disaster in the making, environmentalists cried. Cultural activists bemoaned the loss of thousands of historical artefacts. Relocated residents tell of families torn apart, resettlement troubles and unemployment.

But Beijing insisted then - as it does now - that the benefits of flood control and the clean hydropower generated by the 180 billion yuan (S$36 billion) facility far outweigh these costs.

The project is less than a year from completion. Construction of its centrepiece, the 185m-high dam, was finished in 2003, forever plugging the Yangtze's flow.

Behind it, an immense reservoir is rising in stages and has submerged hundreds of towns and villages between Hubei province and Chongqing municipality. More than a million people in the affected region have been forced to relocate.

Critics have chafed, but official censors have lowered the decibel level of dissent over the years.

In recent months, however, a series of unexpected events has re-ignited the dam debate with a ferocity that has caught Beijing by surprise.

First, there was the uncharacteristically stark warning last September about a potential 'environmental catastrophe' in the Three Gorges by China's usually docile, government-controlled Xinhua News Agency.

Two weeks later, Xinhua caused another stir when it reported that another four million people in the region will be relocated by 2020 in a second phase of migration due to environmental concerns.

That was misleading, officials said later. The move was part of a plan to encourage voluntary urban migration in Chongqing municipality and had nothing to do with relocation for the dam.

Still, this comes alongside the news last November of a major landslide that killed 31 bus passengers in a river town a few bends upstream of the dam and freakish, unexplained weather patterns in the region. People were left asking: Is the Three Gorges Dam causing more problems than officials have let on?

And, if so, is the clock really ticking down to a major disaster?

Reopening the floodgates

THE project has been controversial from the start.

In 1992, China's National People's Congress put it to a vote. So great was the rift in opinion that a third of the 2,600 legislators did not give the project a 'yes' vote, an unprecedented show of dissent given China's usually pliant parliament.

Chongqing University Professor Lei Hengshun was among those who abstained.

The 81-year-old engineer said he had held back because he was not convinced that enough had been done to study the human and environmental cost of the project.

Now, after two decades doing his own research, he says the issue remains far from clear-cut.

'To condemn it entirely or to say that it is entirely beneficial would be simplifying an immensely complex issue,' he told The Straits Times.

Prof Lei was present at the high-level meeting in Wuhan last September in which, according to Xinhua, senior dam experts and officials had warned of an imminent environmental catastrophe if preventive measures were not taken.

Xinhua said the participants had 'admitted that the dam project had caused an array of ecological ills, including more frequent landslides and pollution'.

The water quality in the Yangtze and its tributaries had deteriorated and outbreaks of algae or aquatic weeds were occurring more frequently.

The huge dam reservoir was eroding river banks and triggering landslides in many places, threatening lives, the report added, quoting officials and experts from Chongqing and Hubei.

The news reverberated throughout China and beyond. The international media latched on to the report as rare official confirmation of the true extent of the dam's dangers.

Prof Lei recalled that the participants had spoken openly about problems and 'in strong language', and that they had also discussed concrete, practical solutions.

But it was not the first time officials had recognised the dam's severe environmental challenges, he said.

'From the start, we knew that such a massive project would come with many difficult and complex problems,' he said. 'People who don't know this background would perhaps find the contents of the Wuhan meeting unusual.'

Finding a way to generate clean, much-needed energy was the Chinese leadership's main consideration in building the dam, he reckoned.

The dam's 26 turbo-generators will produce 84.7 billion kwh of electricity annually by the end of the year, enough to power the whole of Shanghai.

There are plans to add another six turbines by 2012. This will push power output to 104.2 billion kwh annually.

The project will also bolster China's push to boost reliance on renewable energy.

'We cannot satisfy the economy's need for energy by buying more oil or burning more coal. Those methods are not sustainable,' said Prof Lei. 'There was no alternative but to build the dam.'

Others take a decidedly different view. 'The dam is a total mistake and an ecological disaster,' declared Mr Wen Bo, a Beijing-based environmentalist, echoing the strong views in the green camp.

Environmental time bomb?

MR SHEN Zhuwu of Shuang Long town, which is located on the banks of the Daning River in the Chongqing region, remembers a time when the water in the Yangtze tributary upstream from the dam was so clear he could see the pebbles on the river bed.

Now, although government-employed cleaners keep it free from flotsam, the water appears as liquid jade.

'The water may look fine to outsiders but we know that it's not as clean as it used to be before the dam,' said Mr Shen, 57, who runs a boat ferry service.

Such talk is 'unscientific', said officials on a recent trip to the dam.

'We monitor water quality closely and tests show there is no discernible difference in water quality before or after the dam,' said Mr Zhou Wei, an official involved in the management of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir.

But local environmentalists are not quite convinced.

'The effects of pollution don't show up immediately,' said Mr Xiang Chun, who is with the Chongqing-based non-profit group Green Volunteer League. 'Things might be controllable now, but in future, there could be unforeseen, disastrous consequences.'

One major worry, they say, is the long-term accumulation of pollutants in the vast 660km-long dam reservoir. Sewage, fertiliser run-off and other domestic waste washed down from populated areas will be locked in instead of being flushed out to the sea.

Fishermen told The Straits Times that, in recent years, they have noticed a build-up of water weeds and algae in some tributaries, a sign of excess nutrients from fertiliser and other types of run-off, especially during the summer months. Previously, weeds could not thrive in the Yangtze's swift-flowing waters.

Another concern is that the weight of the 39.3 billion cubic metres of impounded water behind the dam could increase soil erosion, landslides and earthquakes in a region marked by fragile hillsides.

'The authorities have taken remedial measures but to what extent can the dam's environmental impact be controlled? That is the difficulty,' said Mr Lu Wei, head of a green group in Wanzhou city.

Then there is the human toll. The flooding of 21 counties and cities by the rising water in the dam reservoir, the forced relocation of some 1.3 million people to higher slopes or distant cities and provinces, and the building of new cities to accommodate the exodus: This has been fraught with problems, such as official embezzlement of resettlement funds.

Uncertain future

ALONG the banks of the Three Gorges, white signs reading '156m' stand right at the water's edge. Higher up, the markers say '175m', a reminder that the water level will rise higher soon.

Since the dam blocked off the Yangtze's flow in 2003, the water level in the vast reservoir behind it has risen gradually.

In 2006, it reached 156m above sea level, displacing 1.06 million people from their homes in towns and villages that had remained virtually undisturbed for centuries.

The remaining 300,000 or so will be resettled by the middle of this year, when the water hits its maximum of 175m this September.

All those whose homes or land have been swallowed up have had to relocate.

Resettlement began in 1997. Farmers were allowed to move to new cities built on higher ground. Other residents have been moved to distant counties and provinces such as Shanghai and Guangdong, some 1,500km from their homes, in order to guarantee that the amount of arable land per person remains the same after inundation.

Those displaced outside of their home communities are supposed to go voluntarily but, many times, local resettlement bureau officials decide who must move and apply some heavy persuasion before they leave.

This is how some extended families that had lived together for centuries in one village or town have been split up.

'You cannot imagine the scene on the day people had to leave,' said Madam Liu Tinghui, 36, who owns a confectionery shop in Dachang, a newly built city upstream from the dam. 'Everyone wept.'

Six years ago, her parents and two brothers had to leave the now-submerged old Dachang city for neighbouring provinces.

She has not seen her brothers since because of the distance and cost of travelling.

'The dam is a government project so we must show support,' she said. But, lowering her voice, she added: 'Sometimes it's hard to feel positive. If not for it, my family would still be together.'

For some, moving was just the start of their troubles.

Like the 200 other residents of Shuang Long town, Mr Dong Zetian relocated once to make way for rising waters.

The 81-year-old could not have picked a worse spot for his new house. It is built against a 3m-high wall put up by officials to mark where the river will be when the water level hits 175m above sea level.

In poor health and living alone, he is unaware that the water will rise again and that he will have to move once more. His neighbours were equally confused.

'We've been told we must move again because our house will be too close to the water,' said Madam Sheng Changying, 62. 'But we thought that the water was going to stop at 156m. We don't want to move again. It's such a bother.'

It would not be so hard if she and her husband, Mr Li Jiagui, 65, had their two sons to help them, but the sons were relocated elsewhere.

'All our young people have left; only the old and sick are left here,' said Mr Li.

Living on the edge of uncertainty has taken an emotional toll on the villagers.

'When I look at that sign every day, I feel a heavy pressure in my heart,' said Madam Sheng, referring to the 175m marker. 'I'm not sure what the future will be like for us.'