Wrong Climate for Damming Rivers

Google Earth Tour Reveals How a Global Dam Boom Could Worsen the Climate Crisis

International Rivers and Friends of the Earth International have teamed up to create a Google Earth 3D tour and video narrated by Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award and chair of Friends of the Earth International. The production was launched on the first day of the COP 17 climate meeting in Durban, South Africa on November 28, 2011. The video and tour allow viewers to explore why dams are the wrong answer to climate change, by learning about topics such as reservoir emissions, dam safety, and adaptation while visiting real case studies in Africa, the Himalayas and the Amazon.

• Watch the video and Take Action! to protect rivers from climate change and dams:

Captions are currently available in Castellano, Português, Français, Italiano, and English on the YouTube page.

Download the Google Earth Tour (Courtesy of the Internet Archive)

This Google Earth production illustrates three key reasons that large dams are the wrong response to climate change:

• River flows are increasingly unpredictable. Large dams have always been based on the assumption that future stream-flow patterns will mirror those of the past, but this is no longer true. Climate change has begun to significantly and unpredictably change precipitation patterns. More frequent droughts will make many hydropower projects uneconomic. More extreme rainfall will increase the risk of dam failures and catastrophic flood releases.
  
  
• Healthy rivers are critical for supporting life on Earth. Big dams make it harder for people and ecosystems downstream of dams to adapt to climate change by reducing water quality and quantity, drying up forests and wetlands, flooding productive land, and destroying fisheries.
  
  
• Dam reservoirs emit greenhouse gases, especially in the tropics. Dam reservoirs are a globally significant source of one of the most potent gases, methane. Meanwhile, free-flowing rivers play a crucial role in helping trap carbon.

Off-grid solar village in Nepal

The tour illustrates how melting glaciers in the Himalayas – an effect of climate change – may lead to higher flood and safety risks for communities living downstream of dams. The tour plunges the viewer deep inside one of Brazil's dirtiest reservoirs, at the Tucuruí Dam, to visualize how rotting organic material creates methane gas, which bubbles up from dam reservoirs to emit greenhouse gases. The tour visualizes what smaller, decentralized projects would look like – an approach that could more efficiently meet energy and water needs in Africa, while also reducing the economic risks of drought-crippled dams and protecting life-giving rivers.

Explore the Google Earth 3-D tour:

• Install Google Earth
• Download the Google Earth Tour (Courtesy of the Internet Archive)