China says Three Gorges Dam could spark environmental 'catastrophe'

Asian Economic News, Sept 29, 2007

BEIJING, Sept. 26 Kyodo

Chinese officials have admitted the Three Gorges Dam project has created a string of ecological problems and could spark an environmental catastrophe if preventative measures are not taken, state media reported Wednesday.

Officials attending a forum on the impact of the huge hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River said it had reduced the risk of flooding and started to produce large amounts of badly needed electricity for China. But they added the dam was helping to create serious landslides in the area and the water quality in some of the Yangtze's tributaries had been seriously affected by the project, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Environmentalists in China and abroad have warned for decades the scheme was likely to cause huge environmental damage, but their warnings have previously been largely ignored.

Chinese experts said the huge weight of water behind the 185-meter-high dam, along with fluctuations in water levels, has started to erode the Yangtze's river banks, triggering serious landslides.

Tan Qiwei, vice mayor of Chongqing, said the shore of the 600-kilometer-long reservoir behind the dam had collapsed in 91 places and a total of 36 km of shoreline had caved in.

Huang Xuebin, head of the Headquarters for Prevention and Control of Geological Disasters at the Three Gorges reservoir, said landslides had created waves up to 50 meters high, which crashed on to the opposite shoreline, Xinhua said.

Water quality in the Yangtze's tributaries has also deteriorated, with outbreaks of algae and aquatic weeds more common.

State media reported last month that all the residents of Miaohe on the banks of the Yangtze in Hubei Province had to be rehoused after a 200-meter-long crack appeared in the ground running through the centre of the village.

Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office reporting on the Three Gorges Dam project to the central government, told Xinhua, ''We can by no means relax our vigilance against ecological and environmental security problems or profit from a fleeting economic boom at the cost of sacrificing the environment.''

The forum said measures to prevent landslides and improve water quality need to be increased, including banning fish farming in the dam's reservoir to stop excess nutrients polluting water supplies.

China's government announced earlier this month that it wants about 15 percent of China's energy to be provided by clean forms of power by 2020, mainly through the massive expansion of hydroelectric projects similar to the Three Gorges Dam scheme.

About 1.2 million people have been resettled during the construction of the project, which began in 1993.