The Bakun Dam project --the largest in Southeast Asia-- was originally planned by the Malaysian authorities in the early 1980s, abandoned in 1990, revived in 1993 and reshaped in 1997. The Bakun Hydroelectric Corporation is the owner and future operator of the dam. Lahmeyer International from Germany, Harza from the US and Dohg-Ah Construction and Industrial Co. from South Korea have been involved in the supervising of the works and the construction of the tunnel for the diversion of the waters.
Bulletin articles
The San Roque Dam is to be located on the lower Agno River of Pangasinan Province, in the Cordillera region of Luzon island in the Philippines. If built, San Roque would be the tallest dam --at 200 meters-- and largest private hydropower project in Asia, generating 345 megawatts of power. Electricity generated by the dam would be primarily used to power industrial activity and the burgeoning mining industry in northern Luzon. Preparation of the site began in 1998, and construction is slated for completion in 2004.
Over the past 30 years, activists have fought a long battle for institutions such as the World Bank to adopt social and environmental policies. However, these institutions are no longer the main source of public finance for ‘development’ projects in the South. Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) are now the largest public funders of large-scale infrastructure projects in southern countries, exceeding by far the infrastructure investments of multilateral development banks and bilateral aid agencies.
Vietnam's US $1 billion Yali Falls 720-megawatt hydroelectric dam, under construction for the past seven years -- with funding from the governments of Russia and Ukraine-- drains into the Se San river which runs through Cambodia to the Mekong. Before the dam-building began, no study was done of its environmental effect on Cambodia.
Forced resettlement of local people living in the area where dams are built usually results in human rights abuses. One of the most terrible examples is that of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam, which was built during the military dictatorship in Guatemala. The project resulted in the massacre of more than 400 Maya Achi people, mostly from the community of Río Negro, one of the villages to be flooded by the dam.
The Tocantins River is the main river in the hydrological system of the “cerrado” (savanna) and eastern Amazon region of Brazil. The Brazilian government is planning the construction of eight hydroelectric dams on the Tocantins and Araguaia Rivers. One of them is Cana Brava Dam, located 250 km north of Brasilia, in the state of Goiás, which together with the already operational Tucuruí Dam and the Serra da Mesa Dam will form a nearly continuous 2,000 km staircase of reservoirs.
The Biobío River springs from Icalma and Galletue lakes in the Andes, in southern Chile and flows during 380 km through forests, agricultural lands and cities to the Pacific Ocean, draining a watershed of 24,260 km2. Over one million people use the resources of the Biobío for drinking and irrigation water, recreation, and fisheries.
The Urrá Dam megaproject on the Sinú River in the Department of Córdoba, in the Colombian Atlantic region, constitutes a worldwide known environmental catastrophe as well as a complete disaster to the local people. The dam built by the company Urrá and openly supported by the Colombian government --which considers the project vital for the country's economy-- will flood more than 7,000 hectares of forests and directly affect the livelihoods and the very existence of the Embera Katío indigenous people and the fisherfolk communities of the area.
There is an increasing and worrying gap --in international processes-- between stated objectives and actual action. This was clearly perceived during the recent Climate Change Convention conference in the Hague, where the actual mandate --to find solutions to climate change-- was mostly absent in the discussions.
The first conference of Central African forestry ministers took place in Yaoundé from 4-7 December, within the framework of the follow-up of the implementation of the decisions of the Heads of States Summit held in Yaoundé in March 1999. The ministerial meeting had been preceded in September by a meeting of experts from the forestry departments of the Central African countries. The aims of the organizers of the event --as could be perceived clearly from the agenda-- were the following:
By mid 2000 the World Bank approved a polemic 650-mile oil pipeline project to link the Doba oil fields in southern Chad with the Cameroon's Atlantic coast. The project, led by Exxon-Mobil, and sponsored by Chevron and the Malaysian state-owned company Petronas, is the largest of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.
In many tropical areas mining is a major cause of deforestation and forest degradation, generating a large number of social and environmental impacts. A recent study published by Third World Network-Africa provides a detailed picture of those impacts in the Wassa West District of Ghana. What follows has been extracted from that publication.