
Large dams and reservoirs are not well-suited to a changing climate for two reasons. First, the arteries of our planet are already suffering from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem. Climate change will compound the pressure on vital freshwater resources, and will make projects with large ecological footprints unaffordable. Secondly, big reservoirs cannot respond flexibly to the rapid shifts in streamflows that climate change brings about. Dams that reflect past hydrological patterns may become unsafe as storms intensify, and uneconomic as droughts become more frequent.
Climate change has already begun affecting the world’s rivers and dams. Only last month, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley warned: “The climate is changing, global warming is real and the impact on our hydrology is very severe… Hydropower may not be the sort of exponential source that we considered it to be.” Countries like Tanzania are suffering frequent brownouts because they depend on hydropower projects that are ill-matched with today’s climate. A new paper in the scientific journal, PLoS Biology, found that “particularly for large [water] infrastructure projects, the risks for investors, communities, and ecosystems are extremely high given uncertainties in future hydrological conditions”. It concluded that “climate-infrastructure mismatches may make poor nations even poorer”....
Gordon Dam, Southwest National Park, Tasmania, Australia. Shot by Noodle snacks, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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