In FERN’s latest story, published with Truthdig, reporter Christopher Ketcham unpacks the extensive human and environmental costs of hydroelectricity, even as government regulators, environmental journalists, climate academics, and green-grid design wizards celebrate it as a key piece of our sustainable energy strategy. “According to the World Commission on Dams, the mega-reservoirs needed for industrial-scale hydroelectric production have displaced as many as 80 million people worldwide and adversely impacted some 470 million people living downstream of dam sites,” Ketcham writes. “The U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that ‘resettlement for the displaced and the consequences on downstream livelihoods have led to the impoverishment of millions.’ Indigenous people have ‘disproportionately suffered from these impacts in addition to the loss of their territories and cultural integrity,’ according to the human rights agency. Mega-reservoirs for hydropower have also displaced and destroyed wildlife, causing biodiversity collapses in which fish and other aquatic populations have disappeared almost overnight. The reservoirs have precipitated out of soils a poison, methylmercury, that bioaccumulates in fish and game that Indigenous groups, particularly in the boreal forests of Canada, depend on for survival outside the industrial food system.
This is only some of what we know for certain are the social and environmental costs of industrial-scale hydropower. Other likely costs remain unaccounted for, because concerted scientific studies haven’t been done. It’s known, for example, that by blocking the natural flow of rivers, dams prevent vital minerals from being scoured off river bottoms and banks to be deposited as nutrients in marine food webs. There’s no scientific consensus about the effect this nutrient starvation has had, say, on the largest coastal fisheries of the North Atlantic — the Georges Bank, the Grand Banks — but the evidence leans toward the very bad. In the Arctic, water vapor emissions from mega-reservoirs have caused regional increases in air temperature that may have contributed to the evanescing of ice on the Arctic Ocean, which in turn has accelerated planetary warming. If in fact water vapor emissions from mega-reservoirs can be tied to a warmed Arctic Ocean, the implications for hydropower are … damning.”