Resettlement

1. Background

Project Overview

International Rivers' briefing paper describing the Nam Theun 2 project, its unsettled questions and broken promises, at the time of

Originally published in National Geographic News

While the residents of Majestic Mansion, a new high-end real estate development on the outskirts of Beijing, splash in their glittering blue swimming pool, residents of lakeside Danjiangkou City, just 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) away in neighboring Hubei Province, are packing up their belongings. They are leaving because the Chinese government will soon flood their village to expand the local reservoir. It turns out these two communities are tied to each other by lopsided demands for water, and by an ambitious solution to manage the coveted resource.

Originally published in the WSJ Blog China Real Time Report

Environmental advocacy group International Rivers gives a mixed grade to China's biggest resettlement project since at least 1.2 million people were moved to make way for the Three Gorges reservoir.

The $62 billion South-North Water Transfer Project is the biggest engineering scheme in Chinese history. About 330,000 people are currently being relocated for the expansion of the Danjiangkou reservoir, which marks the beginning of the transfer project's Middle Route.

• From June 2010 World Rivers Review 
  

In the 10 years since the World Commission on Dams (WCD) released its landmark "Dams and Development" report, no single dam project has exemplified the full scope of its cutting-edge approach, and most dam building nations have failed to implement the WCD framework. But there have been some projects that demonstrate WCD principles in action, as well as laws and policies that reflect the principles espoused by the WCD. Here we highlight a few of these positive examples.