We All Live Downstream

I just had this article accepted at the South China Morning Post. It will be run in their Sunday Agenda section on Sunday, July 15th.

Unfortunately they charge to view archived articles. It may appear on the website but I don't know yet. For now I will leave sections of the article here, and hopefully be able to provide a link once the SCMP has run it.

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Ismail Serageldin, former Senior Vice President of World Bank: “The next World War will be over water.”

When rafting on the many tributaries that make up the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh – India's northeastern most state – I learned first hand that rivers are the economic and cultural backbone of South Asia. Journeying through that largely unspoiled rural region which is bordered on three sides by Bhutan, Chinese-controlled Tibet and Myanmar, I met the tribal fishermen and farmers who rely on the river's bounty and water, was witness to the natural beauty of the deep canyon of the Brahmaputra, and found myself enjoying the tribal Siang (Brahmaputra) river festival. The festival has become an annual event, unifying diverse and scattered tribes, linked through the life-giving and life-taking Siang river.

It was shocking to peacefully float down a river in a raft where the only signs of man are bamboo bridges, then to turn a corner and be faced by a gutted forest and mass construction. The Indian government are moving quickly to “develop” Arunachal as its potential hydropower is realised, and its scattered tribes can be damned. Governments appear to play a numbers game when it comes to displacing those who have lived by a river for generations. In fast-growing India, energy is needed for a population just over one billion. There are a million people in Arunachal, most of whom live in close proximity to a river.

The distribution, manipulation and pollution of river waters is creating mounting tension and displacing those downstream (and upstream) all over the world. Water is a matter of life and death.

When talking about water though, you have to consider China. One runs out of superlatives when describing China's energy and water crisis. Water is catastrophically scarce in a country that has built more dams than any other in the world in an attempt to provide energy for the largest population on earth. The little water that is available is heavily polluted. In the arid north and west some 300million people lack clean drinking water. Statisticians tremble at future pressures on the world food supply in the knowledge China uses irrigation for more than 70% of its food production. At the highest levels the question is asked: where will the water come from?

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The geography of South Asia is such that every manipulation of a river by the Chinese has a trickle-down effect. Tibet is known as ‘the roof of the world'. It's the watershed area for ten of the world’s greatest rivers that flow through deep canyons into Asia like giant gutters after heavy rain; feeding almost half of our entire planet’s population. Tampering with these vital waterways in an age of growing climate-change awareness seems ludicrous, yet this is exactly what the Chinese are proposing. Picture the Himalayan glaciers as a massive natural water tank for the world. China wishes to punch a great big hole in that tank and steal water away from its neighbours through a buried pipe no one seems to have noticed.

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Work is well underway on two of the diversions: the central and eastern routes. The western route is an altogether more difficult proposition as it involves diverting water from the mightiest of Tibetan Rivers, the Yarlung Tsangpo, some 800km from the mountainous Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Since the late 1990s there has been Chinese interest in harnessing the hydropower of the Yarlung Tsangpo – that becomes the Brahmaputra when flowing into India through Arunuchal Pradesh, then the Jamuna in Bangladesh; a water source vital to both countries. Its journey takes it through the Zangpo canyon, which in 1994 Chinese geologists announced was the biggest in the world. It contains the Tsangpo gorge: eight times steeper and three times larger than the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. Most importantly, at a sacred site the Tibetans call Pemako – the last hidden Shangri-La – the river makes a dramatic u-turn from east to west, moving into India at The Great Bend. In just 200km the river descends 3000m – the greatest hydropower potential anywhere in the world.

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The sheer outrageousness of diverting such an important river has perhaps ensured the rest of the world remains sceptical. They should start listening. For China it is never a question of 'Should we...?' but always 'How do we...?' Chanyu has proclaimed: “Man should intervene with Nature and reorganize her for his purposes. With this project the drought in Northwest China could be terminated and the flood catastrophes in Southeast Asia brought under control.” He also suggests cheap electricity could be sold to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His words are unlikely to assuage fears for those downstream. With China’s potential ability to turn the taps, as it were, on or off, flood control can take on far more sinister qualities. Control over Tibet's largest river is as great a political tool as any military prowess – like laying siege to an enemy fortress from the safety of your own home. Claude Apri, an Indian based writer and journalist, has said: “China’s green light for the [Yarlung Tsangpo] project could be considered by South Asia as a declaration of war.”

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South Asia’s river network is a manmade mess of diversions and reservoirs; the pollution levels unsustainable. But International Rivers Network campaign director Aviva Imhof has not given up hope. If there is a coordinated and concentrated effort to harness alternative power sources and efforts are made to clean up the water then the rivers are salvageable. “It doesn’t take as long as you would think to restore a river,” she has said. “There have been a lot of dam removal projects in the US and the river has returned to life in a very short space of time, sometimes as short as five to ten years.”

China continues to seek large-scale structural solutions to its growing energy and water crisis, but no matter how great their achievements, the crisis only seems to deepen. The tentative schedule for the initiation of the western component of the North to South Diversion Project has always been 2009, the year the Three Gorges Dam is to be fully operational. China has denied the project at various intervals in the past, but after the Grand Canal, the Great Wall, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Three Gorges Dam, it seems futile to deny the possibility of the 'Great Bend Diversion'. We must avoid yet another footnote in our damning history.