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Pillar of Sand
Post Carbon Fellow Sandra Postel has co-authored a new report Lost in Development’s Shadow: The Downstream Human Consequences of Dams. The report was featured in this article in the Huffington Post.
From the article:
The Indus Delta has not been struck by a natural disaster. Its plight is human-made. The Indus -- the world's tenth-largest river in terms of the water it carries -- has been plugged by 19 dams and is being sucked dry by 43 large canals. The Indus no longer reaches the sea in most years, and its sediments no longer replenish the delta. As a consequence, Pakistani experts told me, 8,800 square kilometers of agricultural land have been lost to the sea since dam building began.
The fate of the people who are being displaced for dams in places like Pakistan, China, Brazil and India have haunted the public imagination for decades. In contrast, the people and ecosystems who suffer under the downstream impacts of large dams have often been ignored. A new scientific paper in the academic online journal Water Alternatives provides an in-depth look at the downstream impacts of large dams. The paper was prepared by a group of researchers around Brian Richter and Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy's Global Freshwater Program, Sandra Postel of the Global Water Policy Project, Thayer Scudder, a former member of the World Commission on Dams, and Bernhard Lehner of McGill University.
Photo credit: Nicholas_T/flickr
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