Context

 The Mekong River, nursery of mainland Southeast Asian civilization and source of food security and livelihoods for some 70 million people, is near the tipping point of severe and irreversible damage from ill-considered efforts to tap its very large hydroelectric power potential. Already, China is constructing a massive cascade of eight dams on the upper half of the estimated 4,800 kilometer long river, including a 292-meter high dam that will be the world’s highest of its type.  Even more threatening to the river’s life-giving “flood pulse” and rich migratory fisheries, Laos and Cambodia have signed agreements with Chinese and other foreign hydropower developers for a series 9 to 11 dams on the Lower Mekong.  These dams will destroy the very basis for the river’s status as the world’s second most productive and biologically diverse river after the Amazon.

Threats to Livelihoods and Food Security

• Blocked fish migration routes will severely degrade the primary protein source of millions
• Altered water and sediment flow downstream will severely harm traditional agriculture, especially rice cultivation in the lowlands of Cambodia and Vietnam, and accelerate the ongoing retreat of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta
• The proposed dams will displace tens if not hundreds of thousands of villagers and leave them without meaningful alternative livelihoods

There is currently no evidence that the net gain in GDP through the consumption or export of electricity will replace the socioeconomic costs of lost livelihoods.  Furthermore, competition for already stressed water resources and widespread dislocation of populations from traditional lands and livelihoods threatens regional peace and stability.

The Project

Stimson’s Mekong Policy Project aims to provide decision makers, the international NGO community and other stakeholders with tools that clearly illustrate the impacts of proposed mainstream hydropower projects.  Stimson’s political economy approach is unique amongst organizations working on these issues from primarily environmental points of view.

Ultimately the project seeks to:

• educate key audiences in the region, including financiers, the media, civil society, and the attentive public about the harmful effects of uncoordinated and unsustainable construction of dams
• influence the infrastructure decision-making process within regional governments, major aid donor nations, and Multilateral Development Banks
• promote expanded awareness of development-environment tradeoffs and impacts in the Mekong Basin within the US foreign policy community and ultimately to offer policy recommendations to the Administration and Congress