On December 17 the World Financial institution is about to vote on financing the Rogun mega dam challenge in Tajikistan. If the vote passes, it will make one of many wildest desires of the Tajik regime come true.
The $5bn Rogun challenge has been in growth for the reason that mid-Nineteen Seventies as an answer for the continual power shortages within the nation. Since 2011, the financial institution has been encouraging it via research and assessments.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has mentioned the challenge is a query of “life or dying”. The challenge might certainly have monumental penalties, however maybe not those the president has in thoughts. Constructing the dam would displace greater than 60,000 folks and trigger irreparable harm to the setting.
Tajikistan is extensively identified for its repression of dissent, suppression of freedom of speech, and stifling of civil society. It’s a nation the place human rights defenders and journalists are routinely imprisoned and attacked, and police torture is widespread.
As highlighted within the current report “Financing Repression”, co-published by the Coalition for Human Rights in Improvement, the Early Warning System and Worldwide Accountability Venture, in Tajikistan’s context, the issues of the affected communities danger remaining unheard as a result of folks concern protesting.
The World Financial institution, which has typically come underneath scrutiny for the damaging impacts of its initiatives, through the years has developed safeguard insurance policies to make sure civic engagement and participation for undertakings it funds. However how can the suitable to participation be upheld in a rustic with such a restrictive civic area and within the context of a challenge the place the navy might be concerned in offering “safety”?
The truth that solely worldwide organisations are publicly scrutinising the challenge and elevating issues, sadly, doesn’t imply that native communities usually are not being adversely affected. Though lower than 25 p.c of the development work has been accomplished, greater than 7,000 folks have already been displaced. In response to a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, resettled households have confronted lack of livelihoods, diminished entry to meals, unreliable and insufficient entry to primary companies, and lack of satisfactory compensation.
Furthermore, the Rogun hydropower challenge would have a devastating affect on downstream communities and ecosystems. It’s being constructed on the Vakhsh River, a serious tributary to the Amu Darya River which flows into Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Inside Tajikistan, the dam challenge would have an effect on critically endangered endemic sturgeons and distinctive floodplain ecosystems downstream, together with “Tugay Forests of the Tigrovaya Balka”, a World Heritage Web site within the Vakhsh River floodplain. It could additionally have an effect on comparable nature reserves downstream, in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Underneath the present proposal, the filling of the Rogun reservoir would additionally severely change the water move to the Aral Sea, an ecosystem that has already suffered one of many largest human-induced environmental catastrophes.
As soon as the fourth-largest saline lake on this planet, the Aral Sea has now virtually dried up because of extremely problematic water infrastructure and cotton manufacturing arrange within the Sixties in Uzbekistan, then a part of the Soviet Union.
The operation of the Rogun hydropower dam will additional have an effect on seasonal patterns of water influx and its quantity supporting the associated ecosystems, their biodiversity, and the livelihoods of the already struggling riparian communities of Decrease Amu Darya and its delta. Water redistribution shortages could gasoline protests and transboundary tensions in a area already vulnerable to conflicts.
Regardless of apparent dangers posed by the operation of a brand new large reservoir, the preliminary affect evaluation denied vital modifications in downstream flows. And as downstream international locations even have extremely restrictive contexts, there are critical doubts that any significant stakeholder engagement could be carried out.
The Tajik regime’s argument that this can be a “life and dying” scenario doesn’t stand. There are alternate options to the present challenge that may present the wanted electrical energy and that might not have the identical environmental and human impacts.
Reducing the peak of the dam might massively scale back the variety of folks that danger being displaced, and the funds saved by downscaling the challenge could possibly be used to construct extra environment friendly photo voltaic farms, thus diversifying the Tajik power sector and avoiding overreliance on hydropower in a area vulnerable to droughts worsened by local weather change. A smaller challenge might additionally forestall a number of the worst environmental impacts.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, the World Financial institution itself spearheaded the institution of the World Fee on Dams. In 2000, the fee launched a damning report clearly demonstrating how mega dams can severely hurt folks and the setting, and why alternate options to any massive dam proposal ought to be severely thought-about from the beginning.
But, with the current push for a fossil gasoline phaseout, massive dams have managed to get renewed assist. Although a few of them emit extra greenhouse gases than fossil gasoline energy crops, dams are being promoted as climate-friendly initiatives and growth banks are once more closely investing in them.
The World Financial institution nonetheless has a possibility to pause the proposed investments and demand a brand new affect evaluation, together with for different proposals. Now it’s the time for the financial institution to replicate on previous errors, hearken to civil society, and shift investments to smaller-scale initiatives the place doable harms could be adequately mitigated. In any other case, the dream of the largest dam will flip right into a nightmare for the folks and nature in Tajikistan and past.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.