Laos notified the Mekong River Commission (MRC) last week of its intention to build a 770 megawatt dam at Pak Lay in Xayaburi province.
Tag: social and environmental damages
Sesan villagers seek land titles
They are now seeking indigenous collective land status to protect themselves from being displaced by future development.
Kachin villagers protest against gold mining in Ayeyawady River
Residents of a Kachin village say their farmland has been ruined due to rampant gold mining on the Ayeyawady River in Myitkyina Township, Kachin State.
No strong deterrents for illegal sand mining
Increased awareness of the negative impacts of sand mining has sparked public outrage of late, but it has proceeded apace.
Experts ‘greatly disappointed’ by yet another Mekong hydropower dam
International environment experts are urging Vietnam and its Mekong River neighbors to cancel another hydropower project amid concerns that the project is flawed and needs to be fixed.
At a meeting held by the Mekong River Commission (MRC) last Friday, officials from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam agreed to set December 20 as the start date for a six-month consultation process for the Pak Beng Dam, the third on the lower Mekong mainstream following Xayaburi and Don Sahong.
A call for basin-wide energy plans
Preparatory work for the next big dam on the Mekong — Pak Beng — in northern Laos has begun. This news supports the widespread narrative that the current rapid pace of dam construction on the Mekong River will continue until the entire river is turned into a series of reservoirs. Certainly the construction of even a few large dams will severely impact food security in the world’s most productive freshwater fishery and sharply reduce the delivery of nutrient-rich sediment needed to sustain agriculture, especially in Cambodia and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.
However, our ongoing research and communication with regional policymakers provides compelling evidence that not all of the planned dams will be built due to rising political and financial risks in the region. As a consequence, we have concluded in our most recent report that it is not too late for the adoption of a new approach that would optimise the inescapable “nexus” of tradeoffs among energy generation, food security, and water use and better protect the core ecology of the river system for the benefit of future generations.
Jarai Say No to Ratanakiri Gold Mine
An insurrection led by ethnic Jarai villagers against the Kingdom’s first commercial underground gold mine, to be operated by Indian-owned Mesco Gold (Cambodia), looms over the green, serene remote hamlet of Plung, a few kilometers from the Vietnamese border, in Ratanakiri’s O’Yadaw district.
Hydropower plants or “hydropower bombs”?
The recent incident at Song Bung Hydropower Plant has alerted Vietnam to reconsider the construction of so many hydroelectric plants, which have been compared to “time bombs”.