Dams @COP26
Today is Day 1 of Week 2 of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. It started off with a great side event panel of river defenders associated with International Rivers, Ríos to Rivers, and the Waterkeepers Alliance, with speakers from dam affected communities in the Klamath river basin in the United States and in South America. The message was clear: Dams are not clean, green, or sustainable. They cause significant harm to peoples, cultures, communities, cosmovisions, environments, economies, and livelihoods. They are a false solution to the climate crisis. They emit methane, a greenhouse gas over 80x more potent than carbon dioxide (in a 20 year period) negating their ability to fight climate change as a mitigation solution. Dams destroy ecosystems and peoples’ connections to nature, sacred places, and rivers. They are unable to withstand the shifting precipitation patterns under climate change - floods and droughts have shown time and again to be too much for dams to handle. See the Orville dam in California as an example; it could not handle a flood in 2017 or the drought in 2020-2021.
The decisions to build dams are frequently taken without any input from the people who rely on the rivers and lands that will be impacted. Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity, and yet, they are not included in the decision making processes regarding conservation and natural lands management. But, as some have asked, there is so much complexity and things are not black and white. Surely there are good dams and times and places when you need them. Right?
No. The legacy of destruction is clear. An estimated 500+ million peoples have been forcibly displaced, without compensation, to areas that do not align with their social, cultural, or ecological needs, and they do not receive the benefits of “affordable electricity.” This so-called sustainable development mechanism in fact creates poverty.
The technology of hydropower has not greatly changed in the past hundred years, and neither have their social, cultural, and ecological impacts. It is clear that they will continue to disrupt the lives and livelihoods of the peoples who have best protected rivers and lands for centuries. Switching from fossil fuels to hydropower is a false solution to the climate crisis that does not adequately consider the entire range of impacts associated with new hydropower projects.
The solution is #Landback, decolonize, and listen to Indigenous peoples. Most countries have been built off the backs of Indigenous peoples and enslaved peoples. The solution is not more genocide in the name of “clean energy.” Invest in local peoples, knowledges, and solutions.
If you want to support the no dams movement to protect sacred rivers and the peoples who manage and depend on them, please consider signing this petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/undam-the-united-nations.
Acknowledgement to the People’s Summit panel on November 8, 2021 at 930am titled False Solutions on land and water: Decolonizing climate action. Amazing speakers included Paul Robert Wolf Wilson, member of Klamath and Modoc tribes, Sophie Grig with Survival International, Kipchumba Rotich, an Indigenous youth leader from the Sengwer of Embobut CBO, Kenya, Thilo Papecek with Counter Current, and Dr Bhanumathi Kalluri, Director at Dhaatri Trust, India.