Vietnam's US $1 billion Yali Falls 720-megawatt hydroelectric dam, under construction for the past seven years -- with funding from the governments of Russia and Ukraine-- drains into the Se San river which runs through Cambodia to the Mekong. Before the dam-building began, no study was done of its environmental effect on Cambodia.
Bulletin articles
Forced resettlement of local people living in the area where dams are built usually results in human rights abuses. One of the most terrible examples is that of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam, which was built during the military dictatorship in Guatemala. The project resulted in the massacre of more than 400 Maya Achi people, mostly from the community of Río Negro, one of the villages to be flooded by the dam.
The Tocantins River is the main river in the hydrological system of the “cerrado” (savanna) and eastern Amazon region of Brazil. The Brazilian government is planning the construction of eight hydroelectric dams on the Tocantins and Araguaia Rivers. One of them is Cana Brava Dam, located 250 km north of Brasilia, in the state of Goiás, which together with the already operational Tucuruí Dam and the Serra da Mesa Dam will form a nearly continuous 2,000 km staircase of reservoirs.
The Biobío River springs from Icalma and Galletue lakes in the Andes, in southern Chile and flows during 380 km through forests, agricultural lands and cities to the Pacific Ocean, draining a watershed of 24,260 km2. Over one million people use the resources of the Biobío for drinking and irrigation water, recreation, and fisheries.
The Urrá Dam megaproject on the Sinú River in the Department of Córdoba, in the Colombian Atlantic region, constitutes a worldwide known environmental catastrophe as well as a complete disaster to the local people. The dam built by the company Urrá and openly supported by the Colombian government --which considers the project vital for the country's economy-- will flood more than 7,000 hectares of forests and directly affect the livelihoods and the very existence of the Embera Katío indigenous people and the fisherfolk communities of the area.
There is an increasing and worrying gap --in international processes-- between stated objectives and actual action. This was clearly perceived during the recent Climate Change Convention conference in the Hague, where the actual mandate --to find solutions to climate change-- was mostly absent in the discussions.
The first conference of Central African forestry ministers took place in Yaoundé from 4-7 December, within the framework of the follow-up of the implementation of the decisions of the Heads of States Summit held in Yaoundé in March 1999. The ministerial meeting had been preceded in September by a meeting of experts from the forestry departments of the Central African countries. The aims of the organizers of the event --as could be perceived clearly from the agenda-- were the following:
By mid 2000 the World Bank approved a polemic 650-mile oil pipeline project to link the Doba oil fields in southern Chad with the Cameroon's Atlantic coast. The project, led by Exxon-Mobil, and sponsored by Chevron and the Malaysian state-owned company Petronas, is the largest of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.
In many tropical areas mining is a major cause of deforestation and forest degradation, generating a large number of social and environmental impacts. A recent study published by Third World Network-Africa provides a detailed picture of those impacts in the Wassa West District of Ghana. What follows has been extracted from that publication.
Malaysia is the world's top producer and exporter of palm oil, generating fifty percent of the global output, of which 85% is exported. Within the African continent, Nigeria is the country having the more extensive oil palm plantations, with at least 350,000 hectares planted to this crop. According to recent news, a Malaysian corporation will begin to invest in Nigeria's palm oil sector, with government support from both countries.
A recent study, sponsored by CIFOR and WWF International’s Macroeconomics Program Office, provides an in-depth analysis of the features and consequences of the rapid expansion of the pulp and paper sector in Indonesia during the last decade.
The Government of Laos (GoL) has halted the Forest Management and Conservation Programme (FOMACOP) after the first five-year phase because of difficulties between the GoL and external actors including the World Bank over the management of logging revenues from the programme.