The Forgotten Downstream Victims of Large Dams

The school of the abandoned Haji Ismail Jat village on the Indus Delta. Retrieved from: InternationalRivers.org

“An estimated 472 million people have likely been negatively impacted by the downstream impacts of large dams. This is the main finding of a scientific study which was just published by a group of eminent global freshwater experts. The study documents the impacts which dams have had on some of the world’s most productive ecosystems, and recommend measures which can prevent the further loss of floodplains that sustain unique ecosystems and millions of people.

“In the 1970s, Kharochan was a bustling town in Pakistan’s Indus Delta. The local farmers grew rice, peas, coconuts, mango and guava on their rich soils. From the nearby harbor Sokhi Bandar — the “Port of the Prosperous” — traders exported silk, rice and wood. When I visited in 2006, no traces of prosperity were left in Kharochan. The port had been swallowed by the sea, and the groundwater had become saline in large parts of the delta. A white crust of salt covered the earth, and turned Kharochan’s fertile fields into parched land. More than half the region’s population lived below the poverty line, and thousands had left their homes for the sprawling city of Karachi.

“The Indus Delta has not been struck by a natural disaster. Its plight is human-made. The Indus — the world’s tenth-largest river in terms of the water it carries — has been plugged by 19 dams and is being sucked dry by 43 large canals. The Indus no longer reaches the sea in most years, and its sediments no longer replenish the delta. As a consequence, Pakistani experts told me, 8,800 square kilometers of agricultural land have been lost to the sea since dam building began.”

read more: Huffington Post