In Nepal, Indigenous peoples have ongoing struggles against dams. Lakpa Angjuk Bhote, secretary of Chyamtang-Kathmandu Welfare Society, told their story to Mongabay.
“The rivers, lakes and forests are at the center of many people’s faith and folklore stories and therefore sacred to locals. The destruction of untouched sacred forest around the project area is desecration of our sacred spaces, deities and our communal faith.”
The contractors came at night with big diggers and ripped up the land, destroying habitat for the red panda, blue sheep, Asiatic black bear, Himalayan goral, snow leopard, musk deer, Himalayan monal. The plan was that they would destroy so much land that it wouldn’t be worth regenerating, and the courts would then accept things as a fait accompli. “Having been with and spoken to many such people, e.g. in the Narmada Valley where dams have displaced tens of thousands, I can attest to the deep emotional and psychological trauma, which no amount of cash compensation can make up for,” Ashish Kothari, co-founder of the environmental non-profit Kalpavriksh, in Pune, India, told journalist Christopher Ketcham.
In 2024, Tessa Wong reported for the BBC how, “For years, Chinese authorities have been planning to build the massive Gangtuo dam and hydropower plant, also known as Kamtok in Tibetan, in the valley straddling the Dege (Derge) and Jiangda (Jomda) counties.” This would submerge monasteries and other holy places, displacing thousands of people. In the ruthless police state that Tibet has been turned into, protest is rare. Even so, the great loss of their holy places and homes forced people out onto the streets where they were met with severe beatings and arrests for protesting against progress.
This sort of ecocide and Indigenous genocide has happened—and is happening—all over the world in order to build dams which have long been heralded as the number one ‘renewable’, ‘green’ and ‘clean’ energy source. They cleared the forests to build dams in the northern Yoro province in Honduras, the home of the Indigenous Tolupan. They tore the Indigenous people of the Volta Grande do Xingu in Pará, Brazil, away from their homes to build the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. On the Xingu and Tucuruí rivers in Brazil, dams devastated the nature, the homes and the livelihoods of the Indigenous people. The Balbina hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon caused the local extinction of several endemic fish species in the Uatumã River.
It’s worth it, we’re told, because hydropower is ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon free’. The Hoover Dam in the United States required 3.4 million cubic meters of concrete and 20,000 tons of reinforcing steel, not to mention all the electrical infrastructure. The Three Gorges Dam in China, the world’s largest, required about 28 million cubic meters of concrete and 256,000 tons of steel. Concrete is the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, with the impact of one cubic meter of concrete potentially reaching 400 kgs of CO2. And these dams won’t last. In time, their concrete begins to crumble.
Dams cause multiple other harms to our environment. They kill rivers, devastate freshwater ecosystems, destroy riparian zones, increase the temperature of the water, prevent fish from swimming upstream, and stop sediment reaching the coasts. “Sediments are something we have deprived coastal systems of because of our upstream dams,” Erica Gies, author of the book Water Always Wins, explained. Without sediment, coastal systems become weaker and less able to cope with normal coastal erosion, let alone that driven by global warming. But they say that’s worth it for the War on CO2.
Dams deprive water of oxygen. According to the University of Utrecht:
“Oxygen is not only essential for aquatic life, it also plays a key role in critical nutrient cycles like carbon and nitrogen. When oxygen levels drop too low, a condition known as hypoxia, ecosystems begin to unravel. Fish die, food webs collapse, water quality declines.”
Oxygen in freshwater is being rapidly depleted because of two key drivers. The first is Green Revolution agriculture and its overuse of fertilizers. The second driver is dams. University of Utrecht researchers explained that “The longer travel time of freshwater to the sea through the construction of dams and reservoirs has proven to be just as important” in depleting oxygen supplies as fertilizer pollution.