Damming downstream flow to neighbors could trigger water wars

By Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, Monday, April 8, 2013

The Chinese government’s recent decision to build an array of new dams on rivers flowing to other countries seems set to roil inter-riparian relations in Asia and make it more difficult to establish rules-based water cooperation and sharing.

Asia, not Africa, is the world’s driest continent. China, which already boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined, has emerged as the key impediment to building institutionalized collaboration on shared water resources. In contrast to the bilateral water treaties between many of its neighbors, China rejects the concept of a water-sharing arrangement or joint, rules-based management of common resources.

The long-term implications of China’s dam program for India are particularly stark because several major rivers flow south from the Tibetan plateau. India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream from it: the Indus pact with Pakistan guarantees the world’s largest cross-border flows of any treaty regime, while the Ganges accord has set a new principle in international water law by assuring Bangladesh an equal share of downriver flows in the dry season. China, by contrast, does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any neighbor.

Yet most of Asia’s international rivers originate in territories that China annexed after its 1949 communist “revolution.” The sprawling Tibetan plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood of mainland China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Other Chinese-held homelands of ethnic minorities contain the headwaters of rivers such as the Irtysh, Illy and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

China’s dam program on international rivers is following a well-established pattern: Build modest-size dams on a river’s difficult uppermost reaches, and then construct larger dams in the upper-middle sections as the river picks up greater water volume and momentum, then embarking on megadams in the border area facing another country. The cascade of megadams on the Mekong River, for example, is located in the area just before the river enters continental Southeast Asia.

Most of the new dam projects announced recently by China’s state council, or Cabinet, are concentrated in the seismically active southwest, covering parts of the Tibetan plateau. The restart of dam building on the Salween River after an eight-year moratorium is in keeping with a precedent set on other river systems: Beijing temporarily suspends a controversial plan after major protests flare so as to buy time — before resurrecting the same plan.

The Salween — Asia’s last largely free-flowing river — runs through deep, spectacular gorges, glaciated peaks and karst on its way into Burma and along the Thai border before emptying into the Andaman Sea. Its upstream basin is inhabited by 16 ethnic groups, including some, like the Derung tribe, with tiny populations numbering in the thousands. As one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, the upper basin boasts more than 5,000 plant species and nearly half of China’s animal species.

The decision to formally lift the moratorium and construct five dams — with work to start immediately on the Songta dam, the farthest upriver structure in Tibet — threatens the region’s biodiversity and could uproot endangered aboriginal tribes. There is also the risk that the weight of huge, new dam reservoirs could accentuate seismic instability in a region prone to recurrent earthquakes.

No country is more vulnerable to China’s re-engineering of transboundary flows than India. The reason is that India alone receives nearly half of the river waters that leave Chinese-held territory. According to United Nations figures, a total of 718 billion cubic meters of surface water flows out of Chinese territory yearly, of which 347 billion cubic meters (or 48.3 percent of the total) runs directly into India.

China already has a dozen dams in the Brahmaputra River basin and one each on the Indus and the Sutlej rivers. On the Brahmaputra, it is currently close to completing one dam and has just cleared work on three others. Two more are planned in this cascade before the dam-building moves to the water-rich border segment as the river makes a U-turn to enter India.

Asia awaits a future made hotter and drier by climate and environmental change, and resource depletion. The continent’s water challenges have been exacerbated by consumption growth, unsustainable irrigation practices, rapid industrialization, pollution, environmental degradation and geopolitical shifts.

If Asia is to prevent water wars, it must build institutionalized cooperation in transboundary basins that co-opts all riparian neighbors. If a dominant riparian state refuses to join, such institutional arrangements — as in the Mekong basin — will be ineffective. The arrangements must be centered on transparency, unhindered information flow, equitable sharing, dispute settlement, pollution control and a commitment to refrain from any projects that could materially diminish transboundary flows. International dispute-settlement mechanisms, as in the Indus treaty, help stem the risk that water wrangles could escalate to open conflict.

China — with its hold over Asia’s transnational water resources and boasting more than half of the world’s 50,000 large dams — has made the control and manipulation of river flows a pivot of its power and economic progress. Unless it is willing to play a leadership role in developing a rules-based system, the economic and security risks arising from the Asian water competition can scarcely be mitigated.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of “Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

(c) Washington Times, 2013.

Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column

Competition for strategic natural resources – including water, mineral ores, and fossil fuels – has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. But now that competition has intensified, as it encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic development over the last three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.

Asia is the world’s most resource-poor continent, and overexploitation of the natural resources that it does possess has created an environmental crisis that is contributing to regional climate change. For example, the Tibetan Plateau, which contains the world’s third-largest store of ice, is warming at almost twice the average global rate, owing to the rare convergence of high altitudes and low latitudes – with potentially serious consequences for Asia’s freshwater supply.

In other words, three interconnected crises – a resource crisis, an environmental crisis, and a climate crisis – are threatening Asia’s economic, social, and ecological future. Population growth, urbanization, and industrialization are exacerbating resource-related stresses, with some cities experiencing severe water shortages, and degrading the environment (as anyone who has experienced Beijing’s smog can attest). Fossil-fuel and water subsidies have contributed to both problems.

Faced with severe supply constraints, Asian economies are increasingly tapping other continents’ fossil fuels, mineral ores, and timber. But water is extremely difficult – and prohibitively expensive – to import. And Asia has less fresh water per person than any continent other than Antarctica, and some of the world’s worst water pollution.

Likewise, food scarcity is a growing problem for Asian countries, with crop yields and overall food production growing more slowly than demand. At the same time, rising incomes are altering people’s diets, which now include more animal-based proteins, further compounding Asia’s food challenges.

The intensifying competition over natural resources among Asian countries is shaping resource geopolitics, including the construction of oil and gas pipelines. China has managed to secure new hydrocarbon supplies through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia. But this option is not available to Asia’s other leading economies – Japan, India, and South Korea – which are not contiguous with suppliers in Central Asia, Iran, or Russia. These countries will remain dependent on oil imports from an increasingly unstable Persian Gulf.

Furthermore, China’s fears that hostile naval forces could hold its economy hostage by interdicting its oil imports have prompted it to build a massive oil reserve, and to plan two strategic energy corridors in southern Asia. The corridors will provide a more direct transport route for oil and liquefied gas from Africa and the Persian Gulf, while minimizing exposure to sea-lanes policed by the United States Navy.

One such corridor extends 800 kilometers from the Bay of Bengal across Burma to southern China. In addition to gas pipelines – the first is scheduled to be completed this year – it will include a high-speed railroad and a highway from the Burmese coast to China’s Yunnan province, offering China’s remote interior provinces an outlet to the sea for the first time.

The other corridor – work on which has been delayed, owing to an insurrection in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province – will stretch from the Chinese-operated port at Gwadar, near Pakistan’s border with Iran, through the Karakoram mountains to the landlocked, energy-producing Xinjiang province. Notably, in giving China control of its strategic Gwadar port in February, Pakistan has permitted the Chinese government to build a naval base there.

Given the significant role that natural resources have historically played in global strategic relations – including driving armed interventions and full-scale wars – increasingly murky resource geopolitics threatens to exacerbate existing tensions among Asian countries. Rising dependence on energy imports has already been used to rationalize an increased emphasis on maritime power, raising new concerns about sea-lane safety and vulnerability to supply disruptions.

This partly explains the current tensions between China and Japan over their conflicting territorial claims to islands in the East China Sea, which occupy an area of only seven square kilometers, but are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. Disputes in the South China Sea involving China and five of its neighbors, and in southern Asia, are equally resource-driven.

While strategic competition for resources will continue to shape Asia’s security dynamics, the associated risks can be moderated if Asia’s leaders establish norms and institutions aimed at building rule-based cooperation. Unfortunately, little progress has been made in this area. For example, 53 of Asia’s 57 transnational river basins lack any water-sharing or cooperative arrangement.

Indeed, Asia is one of only two continents, along with Africa, where regional integration has yet to take hold, largely because political and cultural diversity, together with historical animosities, have hindered institution-building. Strained political relations among most of Asia’s sub-regions make a region-wide security structure or more effective resource cooperation difficult to achieve.

This could have significant implications for Asia’s ostensibly unstoppable rise – and thus for the West’s supposedly inevitable decline. After all, Asian economies cannot sustain their impressive economic growth without addressing their resource, environmental, and security challenges – and no single country can do it alone.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and the forthcoming Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated. This column also in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.

As if to highlight that Asia’s biggest challenge is managing the rise of an increasingly assertive China, the Chinese government has unveiled plans to build large new dams on major rivers flowing to other countries. The decision by China’s State Council to ride roughshod over downstream countries’ concerns and proceed unilaterally shows that the main issue facing Asia is not readiness to accommodate China’s rise, but the need to persuade China’s leaders to institutionalize cooperation with neighboring countries.

China is at the geographical hub of Asia, sharing land or sea frontiers with 20 countries; so, in the absence of Chinese participation, it will be impossible to establish a rules-based regional order. How, then, can China be brought on board?

This challenge is most striking on trans-boundary rivers in Asia, where China has established a hydro-supremacy unparalleled on any continent by annexing the starting places of major international rivers — the Tibetan plateau and Xinjiang — and working to reengineer cross-border flows through dams, reservoirs, barrages, irrigation networks, and other structures. China — the source of trans-boundary river flows to more countries than any other hydro-hegemon — has shifted the focus of its dam-building program from dam-saturated internal rivers to international rivers after having already built more large dams than the rest of the world combined.

Most of China’s dams serve multiple functions, including generating electric power and meeting manufacturing, mining, irrigation, and municipal-supply water needs. By ramping up the size of its dams, China now not only boasts the world’s largest number of mega-dams, but is also the biggest global producer of hydropower, with an installed generating capacity of 230 gigawatts.

The State Council, seeking to boost the country’s already-large hydropower capacity by 120 gigawatts, has identified 54 new dams — in addition to the ones currently under construction — as “key construction projects” in the revised energy-sector plan up to 2015. Most of the new dams are planned for the biodiversity-rich southwest, where natural ecosystems and indigenous cultures are increasingly threatened.

After slowing its dam-building program in response to the serious environmental consequences of completion in 2006 of the Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest — China is now rushing to build a new generation of giant dams. At a time when dam building has largely petered out in the West — and run into growing grassroots opposition in other democracies like Japan and India — China will remain the nucleus of the world’s mega-dam projects.

Such projects underscore the zero-sum mentality that seemingly characterizes China’s water-policy calculations. By embarking on a series of mega-dams in its ethnic-minority-populated borderlands, China is seeking to appropriate river waters before they cross its frontiers.

Asia, the world’s driest continent in terms of per capita freshwater availability, needs a rules-based system to manage water stress, maintain rapid economic growth, and ensure environmental sustainability. Yet China remains the stumbling block, refusing to enter into a water-sharing treaty with any neighbor — much less support a regional regulatory framework — because it wants to maintain its strategic grip on trans-boundary river flows.

Among the slew of newly approved dam projects are five on the Salween and three each on the Brahmaputra and the Mekong. China has already built six mega-dams on the Mekong — the lifeblood for continental Southeast Asia — with its latest addition being the 254-meter-high Nuozhadu Dam, whose gargantuan reservoir is designed to hold nearly 22 billion cubic meters of water.

The current dam-building plans threaten the Salween River’s Grand Canyon — a UNESCO World Heritage site — and the pristine, environmentally sensitive areas through which the Brahmaputra and the Mekong flow.

These three international rivers originate on the Tibetan plateau, whose bounteous water resources have become a magnet for Chinese planners. The Salween, which runs from Tibet through Yunnan Province into Burma and Thailand, will cease to be Asia’s last largely free-flowing river, with work on the first project — the giant, 4,200-megawatt Songta Dam in Tibet — to begin shortly.

The State Council’s decision reverses the suspension of dam building on the Salween announced by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2004, after an international uproar over the start of multiple megaprojects in the National Nature Reserves, adjacent to the world heritage area – a stunning canyon region through which the Salween, the Mekong, and the Jinsha flow in parallel. This reversal is consistent with the pattern established elsewhere, including on the Yangtze: China temporarily suspends a controversial plan after major protests in order to buy time while public passions cool, before resurrecting the same plan.

Meanwhile, China’s announcement of three new dam projects on the Brahmaputra, the main river running through northeastern India and Bangladesh, has prompted the Indian government to advise China to “ensure that the interests of downstream states are not harmed” by the upstream works. Water has emerged as a new divide in Sino-Indian relations.

China’s new focus on building dams in the southwest of the country also carries larger safety concerns. Indeed, Chinese scientists blamed the massive 2008 earthquake that struck the Tibetan plateau’s eastern rim, killing 87,000 people, on the newly constructed Zipingpu Dam, located next to a seismic fault. The weight of the water impounded in the dam’s massive reservoir was said to have triggered severe tectonic stresses, or what scientists call reservoir-triggered seismicity.

China’s rush to build more dams promises to roil relations across Asia, fostering greater competition for water and impeding the already slow progress toward institutionalizing regional cooperation and integration. If China continues on its current, heedless course, prospects for a rules-based order in Asia could perish forever.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and the forthcoming Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times

The world’s largest and most-vulnerable watershed, the Great Himalayan-cum-Tibetan Watershed, is the source of water flows to more than two-fifths of the global population.
Map: © Brahma Chellaney, Controlling the Taps (CLSA, 2012).

The Chinese government’s recent decision to build an array of new dams on rivers flowing to other countries is set to roil inter-riparian relations in Asia and make it more difficult to establish rules-based water cooperation and sharing.

Asia, not Africa, is the world’s driest continent. China, which already boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined, has emerged as the key impediment to building institutionalized collaboration on shared water resources. In contrast to the bilateral water treaties between many of its neighbors, China rejects the concept of a water-sharing arrangement or joint, rules-based management of common resources.

The long-term implications of China’s dam program for India are particularly stark because several major rivers flow south from the Tibetan plateau. Just the Brahmaputra River’s annual cross-border runoff volume, according to United Nations data, is greater than the combined flow of three rivers that run from Tibet into Southeast Asia — the Mekong, the Salween, and the Irrawaddy.

India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream to it: the Indus pact with Pakistan guarantees the world’s largest cross-border flows of any treaty regime, while the Ganges accord has set a new principle in international water law by assuring Bangladesh an equal share of downriver flows in the dry season.

China, by contrast, does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any neighbor.

Yet most of Asia’s international rivers originate in territories that China annexed after the 1949 communist takeover there. The sprawling Tibetan plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood of mainland China and South and Southeast Asia. Other Chinese-held homelands of ethnic minorities contain the headwaters of rivers such as the Irtysh, Illy and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

China’s dam program is following a well-established pattern on international rivers, such as the Mekong, the Salween, and the Brahmaputra: build modest-size dams on a river’s difficult uppermost reaches, and then construct larger dams in the upper-middle sections as the river picks up greater water and momentum, before embarking on megadams in the border area facing another country.

The cascade of megadams on the Mekong, for example, is located in the area just before the river enters continental Southeast Asia. Chinese engineers already have built six giant dams on the Mekong, including the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height, and the 5,850-megawatt Nuozhadu, whose first generator began producing electricity last autumn. At least four more dams are planned in this frontier region.

Most of the new dam projects announced recently by China’s state council, or cabinet, are concentrated in the seismically active southwest, covering parts of the Tibetan plateau. The restart of dam building on the Salween River after an eight-year moratorium is in keeping with a precedent set on other river systems — Beijing temporarily suspends a controversial plan after major protests flare so as to buy time, before resurrecting the same plan.

In fact, according to a 2008 report in Time magazine, work on laying the foundation of four Salween dams continued during the moratorium by reclassifying them as transportation projects.

The Salween — Asia’s last largely free-flowing river — runs through deep, spectacular gorges, glaciated peaks, and karst on its way into Myanmar and along the Thai border before emptying into the Andaman Sea. Its upstream basin is inhabited by 16 ethnic groups including some, like the Derung tribe, with tiny populations numbering in the thousands. As one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, it boasts more than 5,000 plant species and nearly half of China’s animal species.

The decision to formally lift the moratorium and construct five dams — with work to start without delay on the Songta dam, the farthest upriver structure located in Tibet — threatens the region’s biodiversity and could uproot endangered aboriginal tribes. There is also the risk that the weight of huge new dam reservoirs could accentuate seismic instability in a region prone to recurrent earthquakes.

No country is more vulnerable to China’s reengineering of transboundary flows than India. The reason is that India alone receives nearly half of the river waters that leave Chinese-held territory. According to UN figures, a total of 718 billion cubic meters of surface water flows out of Chinese territory yearly, of which 347.02 billion cubic meters (or 48.33 percent of the total) runs directly into India.

China already has a dozen dams in the Brahmaputra basin and one each on the Indus and the Sutlej. On the Brahmaputra, it is currently close to completing one dam and has just cleared work on three others. Two more are planned in this cascade before the dam building moves to the water-rich border segment as the river makes a U-turn to enter India.

Whereas the newly unveiled projects on the Salween and the Mekong are mega-dams with big reservoirs, China claims that its dam building on the Brahmaputra involves only run-of-river plants — a type that generates hydropower without reservoir storage by using a river’s natural flow and elevation drop. However, unlike India vis-à-vis Pakistan or Bangladesh, Beijing is neither willing to share with New Delhi the technical designs nor permit on-site scrutiny.

The relatively large Chinese projects at the Dagu, Jiexu and Zangmu sites on the Brahmaputra indeed raise the possibility that they might impound water in reservoir. Indeed, such is the lack of Chinese transparency that the flashfloods between 2000 and 2005 that ravaged India’s Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh states — located on opposite ends of the Himalayas — were linked to unannounced releases from Chinese dams.

Asia awaits a future made hotter and drier by climate and environmental change and resource depletion. The continent’s water challenges have been exacerbated by consumption growth, unsustainable irrigation practices, rapid industrialization, pollution, environmental degradation, and geopolitical shifts.

If Asia is to prevent water wars, it must build institutionalized cooperation in transboundary basins that co-opts all riparian neighbors. If a dominant riparian state refuses to join, such institutional arrangements — as in the Mekong basin — will be ineffective.

The arrangements must be centered on transparency, unhindered information flow, equitable sharing, dispute settlement, pollution control and a commitment to refrain from any projects that could materially diminish transboundary flows. International dispute-settlement mechanisms, as in the Indus treaty, help stem the risk that water wrangles could escalate to open conflict.

China — with its hold over Asia’s transnational water resources and boasting over half of the world’s 50,000 large dams — has made the control and manipulation of river flows a pivot of its power and economic progress. Unless it is willing to play a leadership role to develop a rules-based system, the economic and security risks arising from the Asian water competition can scarcely be mitigated.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

(c) Japan Times, 2013.