Planned Mega-Dam Threatens Fish Populations and Food Security in Cambodia

By Sabrina Gyorvary
Auntie Punleu has spent most of her life on Koh Dambang, an island set in the middle of the Mekong River in Cambodia. A small, grandmotherly woman, she paints an idyllic picture of life there.
"We catch fish as our main food every day. We eat fish nearly six days a week," she said. With her gentle strength and keen knowledge of community affairs, people on the island look to her as a natural leader. "My children and grandchildren have enough food to eat every day and they are healthy. We do not need to spend money to buy fish. We do not need to beg people for them. They come naturally from the river."
The Mekong River is threatened by a mega-dam project in the Sambor District, one of 11 large hydropower dams planned for the river's lower mainstream.International Rivers
A few kilometers away, Uncle Songom, a resident of the quiet riverside village of Svay Chek, echoed Punleu: "My family have enough food and my children are healthy because of the Mekong River."
Punleu's story is replicated up and down the riverbanks. The livelihoods and cultures of 60 million people in the lower Mekong Basin are intimately connected with the Mekong River's natural cycles. Boasting one of the world's most diverse and productive inland fisheries, the Mekong supplies people in the region with approximately 80 percent of their protein needs. For families living on the margin, the river is an invaluable source of both protein and income.
But this vital lifeline is now at risk, and families like those of Punleu and Songom face an uncertain future. Regional governments are pushing forward a series of large-scale hydropower dam projects that are threatening the Mekong's abundant fisheries, and consequently the food supply of millions.
This past September saw the inauguration of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam, a project that fisheries experts warn will block fish migrations on two of the major tributaries of the Mekong River, the Sesan and Srepok rivers, causing a 9.3 percent drop in fish biomass for the entire river basin. The dam is also expected to flood 36,000 hectares, displacing about 5,000 people. The plans for these large-scale projects are typically conceived and approved in secret, and the communities who stand to lose the most are never consulted.
Free Online Tool Lets You Assess Dam Projects Around the World https://t.co/ydZDlPBf5b @worldresources @FuturePowerG— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1502488861.0
Punleu's island is now facing inundation by one such project: the proposed Sambor Dam. The dam would be located on the Mekong River's mainstream at Sambor town, Kratie Province, Cambodia. This would be one of 11 large hydropower dams planned for the Mekong River's lower mainstream. (In total, some 200 dams are already built, under construction, or planned on the Mekong River system.)
The dams that clogged rivers in the American west in the twentieth century decimated salmon populations, blocking their access to traditional spawning grounds. Now it looks like the same sort of catastrophe is headed for the Mekong, but on an even larger scale. The Sambor Dam alone would block major fish migrations between Southern Laos and Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake, destroy critical deep pool fish habitats, and interrupt the river's hydrological, sediment, and nutrient cycles, impacting the river's wider ecology.
Combined, the 11 dams on the lower Mekong would block the major fish migrations that are essential to the life cycle of around 70 percent of the Mekong River's commercial fish catch. This would result in a total estimated fishery loss of 26 to 42 percent, placing at risk the livelihoods and food security of millions of people.
This would be devastating to Cambodia food security. The country's per capita consumption of inland fish is among the highest in the world and its people depend on fish for nearly three-quarters of their protein intake. According to one estimate, Cambodian fishers pull between 289,000 to 431,000 tons from the Mekong every year.
And impacts would extend beyond those to fish. In addition to providing Cambodia's main source of protein, the Mekong supplies water for the cultivation of rice in an area where irrigated land is scarce. "We can grow rice even in the dry season by pumping water from the river to our rice paddies," Puleau explained. "The river is absolutely essential to us."
The Mekong River supplies water for the cultivation of rice, as well as for drinking and other household uses. International Rivers
The Mekong also serves as the community's only reliable source of water for drinking and household use. "The river is central to our daily lives," said Bunleap, a homemaker and mother of three on Pdau Island. "Not only do we bring water from the river to cultivate our rice fields and vegetable gardens, we also use it for cleaning, cooking and drinking."
Dams upstream are already changing the river, and the area's residents are no longer able to count on the Mekong to meet their needs.
Just five years ago, Punleu's son-in-law could earn 300,000 Riel (US $75) per fishing trip. He made two to three trips per week. This income provided a critical safety net, helping the family cope with unexpected shocks such as hospital bills. Now her son-in-law earns only 100,000 Riel (US $25) per trip—his income has declined by two-thirds.
When asked about the reason for this sharp decline, Punleu said, "I suspect upstream dams could be one of the reasons." So far, seven megadams have been built on the upper Mekong in China, and construction is well underway on the Xayaburi and Don Sahong dams in neighboring Lao PDR. Despite these projects' profound impacts on the food security of Cambodia, they have proceeded with no transboundary environmental impact assessments, and no consultation with affected communities downstream. "I need more information regarding these dams' impacts," said Punleu.
Bunleap's family is also finding it harder to catch fish. Five years ago, the fish they caught for sale provided a crucial source of income. "Now we usually only catch enough fish to eat within our family, and sometimes, we don't even catch enough to eat," she said. "I don't know why. Now we sometimes have to buy fish to cook. My husband has had to change his career from fishing to work as a logger."
Punleu, too, is seeing more family members go off to the forest to log trees. She's saddened by this turn of events, and well aware of the unsustainability of this new enterprise. "What career will we have in our village when there are no more forests to log?" she asked. "In the future, if this decrease in fish continues, making a living will become more and more difficult, and my children's nutrition will suffer. This could really harm my children's health."
Punleu's fears are well founded. A 2013 report financed by Danida, Oxfam, and the World Wildlife Fund shows that the combined impact of mainstream dams and population growth could reduce consumption of fish in Cambodia from 49 kilograms per person per year to as little as two kilograms by 2030. This would have a profound impact on child nutrition in a country where nearly 40 percent of children under five are chronically malnourished, more than 28 percent are underweight, and roughly 11 percent are acutely malnourished.
Songom shares Punleu's concern. "If the fishing gets any worse, I'm scared that I won't be able to feed my family," he said. "I am worried that my children and grandchildren won't have enough food to eat every day, and that they'll get sick."
Five years ago, many people in Bunleap and Songom's villages caught fish not only for their daily meals, but also to make supplemental foods like prohok (fermented fish) that can be stored long-term. For many poorer Cambodians, prohok is the only affordable source of complete protein available year-round, and it's crucial to the country's most vulnerable communities.
Fish and fish products like prohok are critical sources of iron. Already in Cambodia, an estimated 70 percent of pregnant women and 74 percent of children under the age of five suffer from iron deficiencies. Iron shortages rob people of energy, ultimately perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
A decline in fish could also result in weakened muscles and bones associated with calcium deficiency; body-wasting and memory-loss associated with zinc deficiency; decreased resistance to disease from insufficient Vitamin A; and mental retardation caused by too little iodine.
Food security is a foundation on which other important forms of development are built, and wild-capture fisheries are a vital source of nutrients to rural families throughout the Mekong region. As such, protection of wild-capture fisheries should be central to poverty-reduction efforts.
Cambodia still has time to pull back from this path. The Cambodian government could embrace the innovative renewable and decentralized electricity technologies like wind and solar, which are now available and cost-competitive, and could help Cambodia avoid these large-scale and destructive mega-dam projects. By adopting national energy policies that encourage investment in these new energy technologies, the Mekong governments could start growing sustainable, modern economies without losing the many benefits that healthy rivers bring. Punleu, for one, would thank them.
All names have been changed to protect people's identities.
Sabrina Gyorvary is the Mekong Program Coordinator for the global river protection group International Rivers.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Earth Island Journal.
Thousands of Superfund sites exist around the U.S., with toxic substances left open, mismanaged and dumped. Despite the high levels of toxicity at these sites, nearly 21 million people live within a mile of one of them, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Currently, more than 1,300 Superfund sites pose a serious health risk to nearby communities. Based on a new study, residents living close to these sites could also have a shorter life expectancy.
Published in Nature Communications, the study, led by Hanadi S. Rifai, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Houston, and a team of researchers, found that living in nearby zip codes to Superfund sites resulted in a decreased life expectancy of more than two months, the University of Houston reported.
"We have ample evidence that contaminant releases from anthropogenic sources (e.g., petrochemicals or hazardous waste sites) could increase the mortality rate in fence-line communities," Rifai told the University of Houston. "Results showed a significant difference in life expectancy among census tracts with at least one Superfund site and their neighboring tracts with no sites."
The study pulled data from 65,000 census tracts – defined geographical regions – within the contiguous U.S., The Guardian reported. With this data, researchers found that for communities that are socioeconomically challenged, this life expectancy could decrease by up to a year.
"It was a bit surprising and concerning," Rifai told The Guardian. "We weren't sure [when we started] if the fact that you are socioeconomically challenged would make [the Superfund's effects] worse."
The research team, for example, found that the presence of a Superfund site in a census tract with a median income of less than $52,580 could reduce life expectancy by seven months, the University of Houston reported.
Many of these toxic sites were once used as manufacturing sites during the Second World War. Common toxic substances that are released from the sites into the air and surface water include lead, trichlorethylene, chromium, benzene and arsenic – all of which can lead to health impacts, such as neurological damage among children, The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a blog.
"The EPA has claimed substantial recent progress in Superfund site cleanups, but, contrary to EPA leadership's grandiose declarations, the backlog of unfunded Superfund cleanups is the largest it has been in the last 15 years," the Union wrote.
Delayed cleanup could become increasingly dangerous as climate change welcomes more natural hazards, like wildfires and flooding. According to a Government Accountability Office report, for example, climate change could threaten at least 60 percent of Superfund sites in the U.S., AP News reported.
During the summer of 2018, a major wildfire took over the Iron Mountain Superfund site near Redding, CA, ruining wastewater treatment infrastructure that is responsible for capturing 168 million gallons of acid mine drainage every month, NBC News reported.
"There was this feeling of 'My God. We ought to have better tracking of wildfires at Superfund locations,'" Stephen Hoffman, a former senior environmental scientist at the EPA, told NBC News. "Before that, there wasn't a lot of thought about climate change and fire. That has changed."
In the study, researchers also looked at the impacts of floodings on Superfund sites, which could send toxins flowing into communities and waterways.
"When you add in flooding, there will be ancillary or secondary impacts that can potentially be exacerbated by a changing future climate," Rifai told the University of Houston. "The long-term effect of the flooding and repetitive exposure has an effect that can transcend generations."
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A weather research station on a bluff overlooking the sea is closing down because of the climate crisis.
The National Weather Service (NWS) station in Chatham, Massachusetts was evacuated March 31 over concerns the entire operation would topple into the ocean.
"We had to say goodbye to the site because of where we are located at the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge, we're adjacent to a bluff that overlooks the ocean," Boston NWS meteorologist Andy Nash told WHDH at the time. "We had to close and cease operations there because that bluff has significantly eroded."
Chatham is located on the elbow of Cape Cod, a land mass extending out into the Atlantic Ocean that has been reshaped and eroded by waves and tides over tens of thousands of years, The Guardian explained. However, sea level rise and extreme weather caused by the climate crisis have sped that change along.
"It's an extremely dynamic environment, which is obviously a problem if you are building permanent infrastructure here," Andrew Ashton, an associate scientist at Cape-Cod based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told The Guardian. "We are putting our foot on the accelerator to make the environment even more dynamic."
This was the case with the Chatham weather station. It used to be protected from the drop into the ocean by about 100 feet of land. However, storm action in 2020 alone washed away as much as six feet of land a day.
"We'd know[n] for a long time there was erosion but the pace of it caught everyone by surprise," Nash told The Guardian. "We felt we had maybe another 10 years but then we started losing a foot of a bluff a week and realized we didn't have years, we had just a few months. We were a couple of storms from a very big problem."
The Chatham station was part of a network of 92 NWS stations that monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction and other data in the upper atmosphere, The Cape Cod Chronicle explained. The stations send up radiosondes attached to weather balloons twice a day to help with weather research and prediction. The Chatham station, which had been observing this ritual for the past half a century, sent up its last balloon the morning of March 31.
"We're going to miss the observations," Nash told The Cape Cod Chronicle. "It gives us a snapshot, a profile of the atmosphere when the balloons go up."
The station was officially decommissioned April 1, and the two buildings on the site will be demolished sometime this month. The NWS is looking for a new location in southeastern New England. In the meantime, forecasters will rely on data from stations in New York and Maine.
Nash said the leavetaking was bittersweet, but inevitable.
"[M]other nature is evicting us," he told The Cape Cod Chronicle.
By Douglas Broom
- If online deliveries continue with fossil-fuel trucks, emissions will increase by a third.
- So cities in the Netherlands will allow only emission-free delivery vehicles after 2025.
- The government is giving delivery firms cash help to buy or lease electric vehicles.
- The bans will save 1 megaton of CO2 every year by 2030.
Cities in the Netherlands want to make their air cleaner by banning fossil fuel delivery vehicles from urban areas from 2025.
"Now that we are spending more time at home, we are noticing the large number of delivery vans and lorries driving through cities," said Netherlands environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, announcing plans to ban all but zero-emission deliveries in 14 cities.
"The agreements we are setting down will ensure that it will be a matter of course that within a few years, supermarket shelves will be stocked, waste will be collected, and packages will arrive on time, yet without any exhaust fumes and CO2 emissions," she added.
She expects 30 cities to announce zero emission urban logistics by this summer. City councils must give four years' notice before imposing bans as part of government plans for emission-free road traffic by 2050. The city bans aim to save 1 megaton of CO2 each year by 2030.
Help to Change
To encourage transport organizations to go carbon-free, the government is offering grants of more than US$5,900 to help businesses buy or lease electric vehicles. There will be additional measures to help small businesses make the change.
The Netherlands claims it is the first country in the world to give its cities the freedom to implement zero-emission zones. Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht already have "milieuzones" where some types of vehicles are banned.
Tilburg, one of the first wave of cities imposing the Dutch ban, will not allow fossil-fuelled vehicles on streets within its outer ring road and plans to roll out a network of city-wide electric vehicle charging stations before the ban comes into effect in 2025.
"Such initiatives are imperative to improve air quality. The transport of the future must be emission-free, sustainable, and clean," said Tilburg city alderman Oscar Dusschooten.
Europe Takes Action
Research by Renault shows that many other European cities are heading in the same direction as the Netherlands, starting with Low Emission Zones of which Germany's "Umweltzone" were pioneers. More than 100 communes in Italy have introduced "Zonas a traffico limitato."
Madrid's "zona de baja emisión" bans diesel vehicles built before 2006 and petrol vehicles from before 2000 from central areas of the city. Barcelona has similar restrictions and the law will require all towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants to follow suit.
Perhaps the most stringent restrictions apply in London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which charges trucks and large vehicles up to US$137 a day to enter the central area if they do not comply with Euro 6 emissions standards. From October, the ULEZ is being expanded.
Cities are responsible for around 75% of CO2 emissions from global final energy use, according to the green thinktank REN21 - and much of these come from transport. Globally, transport accounts for 24% of world CO2 emissions.
The Rise of Online Shopping
Part of the reason for traffic in urban areas is the increase in delivery vehicles, as online shopping continues to grow. Retailer ecommerce sales are expected to pass $5billion in 2022, according to eMarketer.
The World Economic Forum's report The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem, published in January 2020, estimates that e-commerce will increase the number of delivery vehicles on the roads of the world's 100 largest cities by 36% by 2030.
If all those vehicles burn fossil fuels, the report says emissions will increase by 32%. But switching to all-electric delivery vehicles would cut emissions by 30% from current levels as well as reducing costs by 25%, the report says.
Other solutions explored in the report include introducing goods trams to handle deliveries alongside their passenger-carrying counterparts and increased use of parcel lockers to reduce the number of doorstep deliveries.
Reposted with permission from the World Economic Forum.
A bill that would have banned fracking in California died in committee Tuesday.
The bill, SB467, would have prohibited fracking and other controversial forms of oil extraction. It would also have banned oil and gas production within 2,500 feet of a home, school, hospital or other residential facility. The bill originally set the fracking ban for 2027, but amended it to 2035, The AP reported.
"Obviously I'm very disappointed," State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of the bill's two introducers, told the Los Angeles Times. "California really has not done what it needs to do in terms of addressing the oil problem. We have communities that are suffering right now, and the Legislature has repeatedly failed to act."
The bill was introduced after California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would sign a fracking ban if it passed the legislature, though his administration has continued to issue permits in the meantime, Forbes reported. Newsom has also spoken in favor of a buffer zone between oil and gas extraction and places where people live and learn, according to the Los Angeles Times. The latter is a major environmental justice issue, as fossil fuel production is more likely to be located near Black and Latinx communities.
Urban lawmakers who want California to lead on the climate crisis supported the bill, while inland lawmakers in oil-rich areas concerned about jobs opposed it. The oil and gas industry and trade unions also opposed the bill.
This opposition meant the bill failed to get the five votes it needed to move beyond the Senate's Natural Resources and Water Committee. Only four senators approved it, while Democrat Sen. Susan Eggman of Stockton joined two Republicans to oppose it, and two other Democrats abstained.
Eggman argued that the bill would have forced California to rely on oil extracted in other states.
"We're still going to use it, but we're going to use it from places that produce it less safely," Eggman told The AP. She also said that she supported the transition away from fossil fuels, but thought the bill jumped the gun. "I don't think we're quite there yet, and this bill assumes that we are," she added.
Historically, California has been a major U.S. oil producer. Its output peaked in 1986 at 1.1 million barrels a day, just below Texas and Alaska, according to Forbes. However, production has declined since then making it the seventh-most oil-producing state.
Still, California's fossil fuel industry is at odds with state attempts to position itself as a climate leader.
"There is a large stain on California's climate record, and that is oil," Wiener said Tuesday, according to The AP.
Wiener and Democrat co-introducer Sen. Monique Limón from Santa Barbara vowed to keep fighting.
"While we saw this effort defeated today, this issue isn't going away," they wrote in a joint statement. "We'll continue to fight for aggressive climate action, against harmful drilling, and for the health of our communities."
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World's 5% 'Polluter Elite' Responsible for 37% of Global Emissions Growth, Study Concludes
By Brett Wilkins
As world leaders prepare for this November's United Nations Climate Conference in Scotland, a new report from the Cambridge Sustainability Commission reveals that the world's wealthiest 5% were responsible for well over a third of all global emissions growth between 1990 and 2015.
The report, Changing Our Ways: Behavior Change and the Climate Crisis, found that nearly half the growth in absolute global emissions was caused by the world's richest 10%, with the most affluent 5% alone contributing 37%.
"In the year when the UK hosts COP26, and while the government continues to reward some of Britain's biggest polluters through tax credits, the commission report shows why this is precisely the wrong way to meet the UK's climate targets," the report's introduction states.
The authors of the report urge United Kingdom policymakers to focus on this so-called "polluter elite" in an effort to persuade wealthy people to adopt more sustainable behavior, while providing "affordable, available low-carbon alternatives to poorer households."
The report found that the "polluter elite" must make "dramatic" lifestyle changes in order to meet the UK's goal — based on the Paris climate agreement's preferential objective — of limiting global heating to 1.5°C, compared with pre-industrial levels.
In addition to highlighting previous recommendations — including reducing meat consumption, reducing food waste, and switching to electric vehicles and solar power — the report recommends that policymakers take the following steps:
- Implement frequent flyer levies;
- Enact bans on selling and promoting SUVs and other high polluting vehicles;
- Reverse the UK's recent move to cut green grants for homes and electric cars; and
- Build just transitions by supporting electric public transport and community energy schemes.
"We have got to cut over-consumption and the best place to start is over-consumption among the polluting elites who contribute by far more than their share of carbon emissions," Peter Newell, a Sussex University professor and lead author of the report, told the BBC.
"These are people who fly most, drive the biggest cars most, and live in the biggest homes which they can easily afford to heat, so they tend not to worry if they're well insulated or not," said Newell. "They're also the sort of people who could really afford good insulation and solar panels if they wanted to."
Newell said that wealthy people "simply must fly less and drive less. Even if they own an electric SUV, that's still a drain on the energy system and all the emissions created making the vehicle in the first place."
"Rich people who fly a lot may think they can offset their emissions by tree-planting schemes or projects to capture carbon from the air," Newell added. "But these schemes are highly contentious and they're not proven over time."
The report concludes that "we are all on a journey and the final destination is as yet unclear. There are many contradictory road maps about where we might want to get to and how, based on different theories of value and premised on diverse values."
"Promisingly, we have brought about positive change before, and there are at least some positive signs that there is an appetite to do what is necessary to live differently but well on the planet we call home," it states.
The new report follows a September 2020 Oxfam International study that revealed the wealthiest 1% of the world's population is responsible for emitting more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorest 50% of humanity combined.
Reposted with permission from Common Dreams.
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