Brahma Chellaney The Straits Times 23 Apr 12;
DAM-BUILDING on shared rivers has emerged as the leading source of interstate and intrastate water disputes and tensions in Asia, the world's driest continent where freshwater availability is less than half the global annual average of 6,380 cubic metres per person.
Dam-building has largely petered out in the West but continues in full swing in Asia where such activity has roiled inter-riparian relations, intensifying water disputes and impeding broader regional integration.
Numerous new dam projects in Central, South, South-east and East Asia show that policymakers still seek to engineer potential solutions to the water crisis via traditional supply-side approaches, when the imperative now is to improve water-use productivity and efficiency and to tap non-traditional sources, from wastewater reclamation to rainwater capture, as Singapore is doing.
Dam-building at a number of sites in Asia has triggered grassroots opposition over the submergence of land and the displacement of residents. Such opposition, however, tends to be effectively stifled in autocracies, while democracies struggle to deal with this resistance. Indeed, about four-fifths of all dams currently under construction in Asia are in China, which already boasts slightly more than half of all existing large dams in the world.
Such is the growing interstate water competition that even run-of-river projects have become a source of inter- riparian tensions, although they generally do not alter cross-border flows unlike multipurpose storage dams. These run-of-river dams are mostly small and employ a river's natural flow and elevation drop to produce electricity, without the aid of a large reservoir or dam.
Pakistan has, for instance, invoked provisions in the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty to take a modest-sized Indian run-of- river dam to the International Court of Arbitration, staying further work on the dam.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has fast-tracked its own three-times-larger dam project on the same Himalayan stream, apparently to gain a priority right on river-water use under the customary doctrine of prior appropriation. This Chinese-aided, US$2.16 billion (S$2.7 billion) Pakistani project is located at a border site, just downstream from the Indian project.
Under the 1960 treaty, India set aside 80 per cent of the waters of the six-river Indus system for downstream Pakistan - the most generous water-sharing pact thus far in modern world history.
India, however, is downriver to China, which rejects the concept of water sharing. An extensive Chinese water infrastructure in Tibet will have a serious impact on India, which gets almost one-third of all its yearly water supplies from the rivers originating there.
More broadly, the building of large dams is running into stiff grassroots opposition in Asian democracies.
The future of Japan's US$5.62 billion Yanba Dam project remains uncertain, although the government recently resurrected it. In South Korea, the so-called Four Major Rivers Restoration Project, launched by President Lee Myung Bak in 2009, has become nationally divisive.
The project involves the building of more dams in a country that already has more than 800 large dams and 18,000 small reservoirs, with artificial lakes making up almost 95 per cent of all lakes in South Korea.
In India, the power of citizen groups to organise grassroots protests is such that it has become virtually impossible to build a large dam, blighting the promise of hydropower. Proof of this was the 2010 decision to abandon three dam projects on River Bhagirathi.
In South-east Asia, dam-building disputes fall into two categories - smaller projects in the lower basin and China's mega-dams on the upper Mekong River.
Laos is aiming to earn hydro-dollars through the export of electricity, mainly to China. Indeed, most of the planned Laotian and Cambodian dams involve Chinese assistance. Thailand's own hydro-development plans have further muddied the picture.
Vietnam, located farthest downstream, has the most to lose. Laos, responding to growing regional concerns, has, however, put on hold its largest project, the 1,260MW Sayabouly Dam, until an expert review has been completed.
China's dam-building on shared rivers, by contrast, continues unabated.
After recently commissioning the 4,200MW Xiaowan, which dwarfs Paris' Eiffel Tower in height, China is racing to complete the 5,850MW Nuozhadu, also on the Mekong. The state-run HydroChina Corporation, meanwhile, has unveiled a plan to build a dam more than two times as large as the Three Gorges Dam at Metog, close to the disputed, heavily militarised border with India.
Asia is the hub of the global water challenges. To contain the rising security risks, Asian states must build institutionalised water cooperation based on transparency, information sharing, equitable distribution of benefits, dispute settlement, pollution control, and a mutual commitment to refrain from projects that could diminish transboundary flows.
The writer is a Bosch Public Policy Fellow with The Transatlantic Academy in Washington, and the author of the recently published Water: Asia's New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
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