Darrin Magee

Hydropower and sustainability: Resilience and vulnerability in China's powersheds

Large dams represent a whole complex of social, economic and ecological processes, perhaps more than any other large infrastructure project. Today, countries with rapidly developing economies are constructing new dams to provide energy and flood control to growing populations in riparian and distant urban communities. If the system is lacking institutional capacity to absorb these physical and institutional changes there is potential for conflict, thereby threatening human security. In this paper, we propose analyzing sustainability (political, socioeconomic, and ecological) in terms of resilience versus vulnerability, framed within the spatial abstraction of a powershed. The powershed framework facilitates multi-scalar and transboundary analysis while remaining focused on the questions of resilience and vulnerability relating to hydropower dams. Focusing on examples from China, this paper describes the complex nature of dams using the sustainability and powershed frameworks. We then analyze the roles of institutions in China to understand the relationships between power, human security and the socio-ecological system. To inform the study of conflicts over dams China is a particularly useful case study because we can examine what happens at the international, national and local scales. The powershed perspective allows us to examine resilience and vulnerability across political boundaries from a dynamic, process-defined analytical scale while remaining focused on a host of questions relating to hydro-development that invoke drivers and impacts on national and sub-national scales. The ability to disaggregate the affects of hydropower dam construction from political boundaries allows for a deeper analysis of resilience and vulnerability. From our analysis we find that reforms in Chinas hydropower sector since 1996 have been motivated by the need to create stability at the national scale rather than resilient solutions to Chinas growing demand for energy and water resource control at the local and international scales. Some measures that improved economic development through the market economy and a combination of dam construction and institutional reform may indeed improve hydro-political resilience at a single scale. However, if China does address large-scale hydropower constructions potential to create multi-scale geopolitical tensions, they may be vulnerable to conflict - though not necessarily violent - in domestic and international political arenas. We conclude with a look toward a resilient basin institution for the Nu/Salween River, the site of a proposed large-scale hydropower development effort in China and Myanmar.

Modeling the costs and benefits of dam construction from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Although the benefits of dam construction are numerous, particularly in the context of climate change and growing global demand for electricity, recent experience has shown that many dams have serious negative environmental, human, and political consequences. Despite an extensive literature documenting the benefits and costs of dams from a single disciplinary perspective, few studies have simultaneously evaluated the distribution of biophysical, socio-economic, and geopolitical implications of dams. To meet the simultaneous demands for water, energy, and environmental protection well into the future, a broader view of dams is needed. We thus propose a new tool for evaluating the relative costs and benefits of dam construction based on multi-objective planning techniques. The Integrative Dam Assessment Modeling (IDAM) tool is designed to integrate biophysical, socio-economic, and geopolitical perspectives into a single cost/benefit analysis of dam construction. Each of 27 different impacts of dam construction is evaluated both objectively (e.g., flood protection, as measured by RYI years) and subjectively (i.e., the valuation of said flood protection) by a team of decision-makers. By providing a visual representation of the various costs and benefits associated with two or more dams, the IDAM tool allows decision-makers to evaluate alternatives and to articulate priorities associated with a dam project, making the decision process about dams more informed and more transparent. For all of these reasons, we believe that the IDAM tool represents an important evolutionary step in dam evaluation.

Biophysical, Socioeconomic, and Geopolitical Vulnerabilities to Hydropower Development on the Nu River, China

Rapid hydropower development is occurring in China’s Yunnan province in response to increasing clean energy demands, exposing potential vulnerabilities of the area’s ecosystems, communities, and geopolitical systems. Here, the authors present original data on the cultures, economics, hydro-politics, and environments of the Nu River basin, based on household surveys, analysis of geopolitical events, and hydrological, hydraulic, and landscape modeling. The authors identify sources of vulnerability and investigate relationships among biophysical, socioeconomic, and geopolitical elements that contribute to vulnerability. The results illustrate the role of geographic isolation in intensifying vulnerability to hydropower development and how access to information, data uncertainty, and geopolitics influence the vulnerability of people and the environment. The authors emphasize specific needs for developing support mechanisms for social, ecological, and political groups that are vulnerable to hydropower development.

BEYOND THREE GORGES: NU RIVER HYDROPOWER AND ENERGY DECISION POLITICS IN CHINA

Abstract This paper examines hydropower development on the Nu (Salween) River in China. A 13-dam, 21-Gigawatt cascade scheduled for ecologically and culturally rich western Yunnan was halted in 2004 by Premier Wen Jiabao, a decision lauded by environmental protection and cultural preservation advocates. Labeled “predatory development” by the Minister of Water Resources, the status of the projects remains unclear, yet preliminary work continues, signaling a disjuncture between central planners on the one hand and local government and hydropower industry interests on the other. This paper details the cascade and situates it in a rapidly changing institutional background fraught with tensions created by new laws, old habits, and increasingly open debate. The Nu River case highlights the greater flexibility for opportunistic behavior brought by recent hydropower reforms and the continued marginalization of communities impacted by Chinas hydropower program.

Moving the River? China’s South–North Water Transfer Project

The Chinese government has embarked upon an earth engineering project of unprecedented scale to address increasingly worrisome trends in freshwater resources in the northern part of the country. The South-North Water Transfer (nanshui beidiao) project will bring water from the relatively water-rich Yangtze River basin in the south to the relatively water-scarce (and exceedingly over-abstracted) Yellow River basin in the north. The project involves three channels (east, central, and west) of varying length, complexity, ecological and socioeconomic impact, and technical and economic feasibility. In this chapter, I briefly outline the overall situation of China’s freshwater resources and sketch the details of the SNWT project. I then use the newly engineered watersheds as analytical scales for a discussion of potential (and in some cases, extant) socioeconomic, biophysical, and geopolitical impacts from the project.

The Dragon Upstream: China’s Role in Lancang-Mekong Development

This chapter examines China’s development on the upstream half of the Lancang-Mekong river, including the perspectives on local, regional, national, and international development that inform and motivate the nature and magnitude of that development. The primary goals of the chapter are to explain China’s development approach to the Lancang-Mekong basin, Chinese development priorities for the upper half of the basin, and how those priorities are shaped and acted upon in China. I begin by describing the physical and human geographic characteristics of the Chinese half of the Lancang-Mekong Basin. Next, I lay out a series of problems or issues as perceived within China, and show that the corresponding solution to each problem wholly or partially justifies (from the Chinese development state’s perspective) the construction of major infrastructure projects in southwestern and western China, of which the Lancang hydroelectric cascade is a major component. Finally, I discuss decision-making structures and practices in China and how they shape China’s engagement with downstream neighbors regarding basin-wide development.

The politics of water in rural China: a review of English-language scholarship

Politics is about access and power, and access to freshwater resources in rural China is complicated and understudied. Chinas massive size and diverse climate make it hard to generalize about freshwater resources in rural areas of the country. On balance, China is not water-scarce, yet geographic and temporal variations in water availability are dramatic, with Chinas driest areas receiving far less precipitation than the wettest areas. Rural areas are the locus of competition among freshwater users including agriculture, power companies, industry, households and ecosystems. Additionally, while peasants may hold usage rights (not title) to farmland, it is not a given that they will hold rights to water that will guarantee the productivity of that farmland in areas where precipitation is low. Finally, water quality is, unfortunately, an increasingly important factor affecting the availability of ‘fresh’ water, as is evident in the notion of quality-induced scarcity (shuizhixing queshui). This contribution reviews a small but important body of scholarship on rural water politics in China, identifying existing themes and suggesting new directions where scholarship is currently lacking.