The Bangkok Post ran this story on 22 February:
Ever since the completion of a few dams across the Mekong river in China, the once mighty river, which flows through all the riparian countries except China, has diminished to a trickle every dry season. The situation this year is worse than the previous years and the worst is yet to come with more dams being built.
If they were alive today, our forefathers would be in shock. The mighty Mekong – the traditional lifeline of Chinese, Burmese, Thais, Lao, Cambodians and Vietnamese – has dried up so badly this year that it no longer qualifies to be called a river.
Boat travel from Chiang Rai’s Chiang Khong district to the old Lao capital of Luang Prabang, a popular tourist route has been halted because the water too shallow for boats with the capacity to accommodate more than four people. Cargo boats from China have been stranded in Chiang Saen district of Chiang Rai.
Chirasak Inthayos, coordinator of the Network for the Conservation of Mekong River Natural Resources and Cultures, said that the river’s condition is the worst for more than a decade. He could only imagine how much worse it will be by April, when the dry season normally peaks.
This drying up of the Mekong River is attributable to the closure of four Chinese dams in the upper reaches of the river reportedly to conserve water for electricity generation. The southern Chinese province of Yunnan, which borders Burma and Laos, is reported to be experiencing the worst drought in more than 60 years.
It is obvious that the Chinese government could not care less about the hardships it causes people and countries along the Mekong down river from the dams. Beijing is interested only it its own people and its ever expanding industrial, business and farming sectors. …
I’m sceptical about simplified and sensationalist explanations of environmental change. No doubt, the Chinese dams on the Mekong have all sorts of environmental and social impacts, but is there really good evidence to support the claim that they have significantly reduced dry-season flows downstream?
Can anyone point us to some long term data on dry season stream flow that would illustrate this sudden decline? I’ve had a very quick search but cannot find any long term data. I did find this report from the Mekong River Commission that states:
There is little evidence from the last 45 years [up to 2004] of data of any systematic changes in the hydrological regime of the Mekong. … There has been a lot of debate about the dry season hydrology of the mainstream and there is a widespread belief that there has been significant change due to upstream reservoir storage in China. Figure 4.8 shows the minimum daily discharge averaged over a sequence of 90-days in each year from 1960 to 2004 for Vientiane and Kratie. Such a “long duration” statistic can be regarded as an effective measure of dry season flow conditions from year to year. The data show that:
- There is no evidence of any systematic change in the low-flow hydrology, either in terms of a long-term increase or decrease in dry season discharge.
- The plot includes a range of ±2 standard deviations either side of the longterm average 90-day annual low flow. Years when the flows lie outside of this range may be considered exceptional, the most recent of these being 1999 (or the dry season following the poor flood season of 1998).
- Current claims that the low-flow hydrology of 2004 was exceptional and far below “normal” appear unfounded and are probably linked to the fact that the previous years from 2000 onwards had above average flows during the dry season.
I would be interested in seeing an analysis that extends to 2009, and which focuses on river flow at Chiang Saen and Luang Phrabang, where the relative influence of the Chinese section of the river is much greater.
Interestingly, today the Bangkok Post has a report about water shortages throughout Thailand:
An early drought is raising fears of a “water war” among rice farmers, the Royal Irrigation Department says. Large reservoirs and dams are only about 66% full, director-general Chalit Damrongsak said yesterday. The department fears there will not be enough irrigation water to last through the hot season. The country could not avoid a severe drought if water use exceeded earlier predictions, Mr Chalit said.
Are the Chinese dams to blame for these shortages too?
19 responses so far ↓
1 The Frog // Feb 24, 2010 at 10:35 pm
“North of Vientiane, about 50 percent of the Mekong’s dry season water flow comes from China, so the potential influence of the Chinese dams in increasing dry season flows will be more significant in the upper part of the lower Mekong basin (in northern Lao PDR and Thailand). However most of the wet season flows are generated in the area downstream of the Chinese dams and so they will have minimal influence on the flood peaks.” – MRC FAQ
If the Xiaowan dam’s reservoir is now being filled, this could have an impact on downstream water levels not seen before.
Although it is only to 2003, Lu, Wang and Grundy-Warr from NUS have data on Chiang Saen – maybe they would know more about getting something more up-to-date? What they have seems to confirm your points.
http://www.water.tkk.fi/English/wr/research/global/myth/04_Lu&al_Myths-of-Mekong.pdf
I wonder if there is any connection to this furor and EGAT’s potential investment in one of those dams. Investment was initially going to be in the dam at Jinghong before the 97 financial crisis, but then they (EGAT) pulled out. Apparently they’ve now targeted investment interest in Nuozhudu… ??
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2 Suzie Wong // Feb 25, 2010 at 9:17 am
Bangkok Post continues reporting news in the form of assertion instead of verification. Instead of maintaining objectivity, this particular news reporting reflects the anti-China Cold War mentality. We already have Not the Nation, do we need Not the Bangkok Post? The basic element of journalism is to never add anything that was not there, never deceive the audience.
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3 Ian Baird // Feb 25, 2010 at 10:15 am
Andrew is justified in being skeptical about the links between extremely low dry season water-levels in the Mekong and the presence of Chinese dams in the upper Mekong. However, my take on things is different again.
First, we need to separate construction period impacts from operation period impacts. At present, those who discuss these issues tend to lump the two together erroneously, without understanding the types of differences that should be expected between the two. For example, with the Yali Falls dam in Vietnam, the downstream impacts to the Sesan River in Cambodia during the construction period were very different from those that were observed during the operational period. During construction, water levels varied widely from unusually low to unusually high, and were quite unpredictable. However, with a large reservoir dam such as Yali, the situation changed dramatically once the dam started operating. There were still daily fluxuations, but they were more moderate and predictable. They were based on a profit-maximising operating regime mandating that most electricity be generated when the price is highest, during the peak power usage period in HCMC. When prices are low (i.e. during the middle of the night when people are mainly sleeping), water is not released downstream.
More importantly, in relation to the issue of concern to Andrew, one would actually expect that once operational, water levels would be higher during the dry season due to Chinese dams, not lower! However, the construction of dams upstream may be causing lower levels during this dry season. Over the long-term, however, dry season water levels can be expected to be higher, and that, in fact, can be considered to be problematic from a ecological and livelihood perspective. The argument runs quite differently than what Andrew has mentioned.
Chinese dams are, I am sure, having hydrological impacts downstream. In fact, daily human-induced hydrological fluctuations caused by dams have been noticeable by villagers in Laos and Thailand for years now, and this should not be a surprise to anyone, but the issue of how much water is in the river is much more complicated than what is being commonly stated.
In addition, we should not be overly concerned about past hydrological data, because the dam construction that is going on at present is unprecedented for the Mekong, so what is happening now represents something new, something unlike anything that has occurred in the Mekong Basin before.
The Chinese dams are a threat to the ecology of the Mekong River as we know it today, but let’s not expect that over the long-term the dams will reduce water levels in the Mekong during the dry season. The opposite is likely to be the case. The dams collect water in the rainy season and release it to produce electricity during the dry season. That is the nature of dams with large reservoirs, especially those built in areas with monsoonal climates, and thus wide fluctuations in precipitation and water levels seasonally.
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4 Andrew Walker // Feb 25, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Thanks Ian, some good points here. But I can’t let this go by:
“we should not be overly concerned about past hydrological data, because the dam construction that is going on at present is unprecedented for the Mekong, so what is happening now represents something new.”
Surely if anyone is attempting to demonstrate impacts (unprecedented or otherwise) a serious attempt to establish the “baseline” hydrological condition would be the first step.
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5 Ian Baird // Feb 25, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Yes, I didn’t really make my point very clearly, and I do agree with you. However, what I wrote was that we should not be “overly concerned”. That does not mean that we should ignore past data altogether. It just means that we should recognise that there are severe limits to what can be understand using just the present data. The limitations are mainly related to the scale of data collection and analysis. Right now there are daily fluctuations in water levels being caused by the dams, but because official data are only being collected on a daily basis, the changes that are taking place over 24 hour periods are not easily identifiable. For example, if the water is up in the morning and then drops in the evening before rising again the next morning (as would be expected for operating regimes that maximize profit), this might not show up if water levels are monitored once a day, at the same time each day, as is common practice. So, we need to look beyond the present data, although I am not proposing that we don’t look at it as well. Sorry, I was not clear about my reasoning in my last posting. Sometimes I forget that things that I assume are not necessarily common knowledge for others.
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6 R. N. England // Feb 25, 2010 at 6:19 pm
I have no idea whether it is possible, but the geography of the upper Salween and Mekong suggests that the Chinese might be tempted divert their waters into the Yangtse in a kind of giant Snowy scheme, starving Laos, part of Burma, NE Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam. Any comments from the more hydrologically informed?
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7 John Roberts // Feb 26, 2010 at 11:53 am
Dear All
This is one of my soap box topics from sitting on the banks of the Mekong for only a short six years – as with farmers in the desert people only have a memory of the exceptional years.
By pure recollection, unfortunately not by scientific record, in at least 50% of the previous years large boat traffic between Chiang Saen and Jing Hong has been halted by low water at some point – the huge new Chiang Saen port is seemingly being built with only the memory of the year round transportation in mind.
It is undoubtedly early this year (even though, thanks to a 23mm storm in January Chiang Saen is sitting on the wettest year in the six that I’ve been recording – our local reservoirs would be full if year round crop irrigation for an increasing amount of cleared land wasn’t also nowdays considered as normal as year round large boat transportation) and I’ve not known slow boat transport to Luang Prabang be stopped before (though I was in Tha Souang the other day – after the ‘banning’ and was offered slow boat transportation both to Huay Xai and to Luang Prabang so some boats are still running, how safely and reliably I wouldn’t care to guess).
Though I’m sure damming must have some effect on rivers and on water supplies I have long been convinced (http://bit.ly/9I8uFi – written last year when the situation was, admittedly, better; the graph in that piece is from the below link and so points to todays situation) that yearly cries of drought and flood are more to do with land use and irrigation changes – not to mention access to disaster relief grants – indeed was relieved to see the same scientifically set out in FD, FD.
A resource that I’m sure you all know about is the Mekong River Commission’s Resource website (http://bit.ly/aWELGD) currently showing that in Chiang Saen we are still on a par with the ’93 dry season.
Clicking onto the Luang Prabang data shows an interesting difference in patterns between the two stations – not least, in the old Royal capital ’04 seems to have been dryer than ’93, vice versa in Chiang Saen.
Over to scientists for explanation – I’ve got to get off my soap box and look after some elephants.
Thanks
John
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8 chaokhao // Feb 26, 2010 at 1:59 pm
It seems to me that I have seen some river flow data as related to the virtual disappearance of the pla beuk in the BHS/Xg Kong area…but can not find it now. Anyone?
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9 Andrew Walker // Mar 1, 2010 at 5:55 pm
This article provides an alternative perspective on the main cause of the low water levels:
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10 Ed Lee // Mar 9, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Thank you for the interesting discussions here.
Can someone enlighten me if there has been any study to assess the potential impact of such changes to Mekong flow on the Tonle Sap flood plain?
Many thanks.
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11 David Blake // Mar 9, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Perhaps worth revisiting Tyson Roberts predictions about the decline of the Mekong River following China’s ‘fluvicidal’ dam cascade plans. His comments on drought are particularly germane in the present context. He gave the scheme only 30 years before nature catches up with engineering. By that time, the river will be a shadow of it’s former productive and biodiverse self, like most in China:
http://www.internationalrivers.org/files/tyson%20roberts%20paper%20on%20yunnan.pdf
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12 The Frog // Mar 10, 2010 at 11:00 am
Kasemsun Chinnavaso, director-general of the Water Resources Department, said China had invited representatives from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand early this year to visit the Jinghong dam, one of four dams it operates along the Mekong River, but the trip was postponed due to cold weather. ??
http://bangkokpost.com/news/local/34170/china-asks-mekong-states-to-visit-dam
Jinghong weather conditions for January
————————————–Max:—-Avg:——-Min:
Max Temperature————-30 °C—27 °C——15 °C
Mean Temperature———–22 °C—20 °C——-16 °C
Min Temperature ————–17 °C—12 °C———8 °C
http://www.wunderground.com/history/station/56959/2010/1/10/MonthlyHistory.html
Must have been really difficult to put on one of those jackets they use in Antarctica. Too many straps.
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13 Ed Lee // Mar 10, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Thanks David,
Roberts paper was enlightening though it was clear we are still quite unclear about long term effects on TonleSap and the entire ecosystem there. Clearly the communities living on the flood plain will be considerably impacted.
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14 Global Voices Online » Indochina: Drying up of Mekong River // Mar 11, 2010 at 7:13 pm
[...] Walker, writing for the New Mandala, blogs about the drying up of Mekong River in Indochina. Cancel this [...]
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15 DucDigital // Mar 12, 2010 at 4:24 am
I’m a Vietnamese, reading news recently bring me so much anger with the chinese.
For thousands of year, they have been tried to invade Vietnam and their neighborhood. Now, Mekong river is dried up because of their dams, yet they said there is “no proof” of their dam is making Mekong River dried…
And conference? Invitation to see their dam and it’s impact? Just like The Frog said up above my comment here, it’s a shame that people can’t just put a jacket on.
China is ruining Mekong Detal River’s culture and it’s people and use mekong for their source of income, for a living. There are people who lived on boat and sail everyday with the mekong river, they live with it.
This’s not just about Nature, it’s also about political.
Can someone stop china from being like this? Please?
Duc, From Vietnam
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16 Saksit Tasong // Mar 17, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Dear Graceful Human Beings,
Drying up of the Mekong river is as easy as making and using Money for exclusive Power. Why men are willing to kill themselves by using paper sheet – so called “Money”? How clever humankind can be if living without Money use!!!! Please share with me your creative ideas, if you see unlimited using Money is the most dangerous and will lead all of us toward the Hell! For having Money people can do anything, but can not I!. Can long-long-long time civilized countries empty half of your wealth for the poor and recently developed countries? so we are equalized as our world will last longer for you and I?
Kind regards,
Saksit Tasong
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17 Saksit Tasong // Mar 17, 2010 at 9:37 pm
*Drying up of the Mekong river is basically easy
*Smoke producing for global warming is technically difficult
*Both easy/difficult must be executed by human, who’s looking for MONEY
Can clever men limit MONEY power into half of current situation? otherwise, not only Mekong dried up, global warming but Shorten Earth life.
Come on, we live on the same earth weighed 6E+24…kg, let’s save and love our lives even you are rich I am poor – our lives worth equally = your dead rich life can not change my poor living life!.
Reducing half MONEY power, will minimize half earth destruction and moderate inappropriate human competition
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18 Xiaowan filling and the Mekong // Mar 29, 2010 at 8:08 am
[...] by Alan Potkin, appeared on one of the Lao email lists. It is a useful critical follow-up to my earlier post on the Mekong and an associated press report in Al-Jazeera. In an Al-Jazeera article published on 8 [...]
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19 A Chinese perspective on the damned Mekong // Jul 1, 2010 at 9:10 pm
[...] outlook is less promising further upstream in China. While I agree that only time will tell how the Chinese dams affect downstream flows, it is pretty clear that China acts unilaterally and [...]
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