Energy and Development by Urban Frauke;

Author:Urban, Frauke;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Displacement, resettlement and impacts on livelihoods and lifestyles

Around the world, dam building has led to the displacement and relocation of millions of people. In some cases, it has been reported that affected people were relocated to areas without appropriate infrastructure that lacked basic amenities, such as sanitary facilities, drinking water, electricity and roads, for example, at Tarbela (Pakistan) and Tucuruí (Brazil) ( Asianics Agro-Dev. International (Pvt) Ltd, 2000; La Rovere & Mendes, 2000). Lacking access to safe drinking water resulted in various health impacts, such as a higher prevalence of diseases and risk of dehydration.

In other cases, and most notably in China, people were relocated from rural areas to modern cities where they had improved access to infrastructure and modern amenities, including access to modern healthcare, but lost their rural livelihoods. The Chinese Three Gorges Dam included the flooding of 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages and the flooding of numerous sites of cultural, historic and religious heritage. For the Three Gorges Dam, 1.3 million inhabitants were relocated, many of them from rural areas to the cities (Rissler, 2002; International Rivers, 2008). It has been reported that many subsistence farmers and fishermen were relocated to urban areas, or they received tiny slots of barren land as compensation. As a result, many people were worse off after the resettlement than before due to loss of livelihoods, increased unemployment, decreased income and insufficient land for subsistence farming. Scientific studies suggest that the resettlement process and the loss of cultural and social roots at the Three Gorges Dam resulted in decreased mental health, induced by mental stress, and an increase of depression among the resettled population (Hwang et al., 2007).

Other key social problems regarding relocations include the following, which have adverse effects on well-being and mental health: compensation payments are often too low for a decent living, relocation of the local population often results in loss of livelihoods, such as fisheries or subsistence farming, and compensation payments are not equally distributed which means that some people do not receive any compensation at all or do so only years after their relocation. With regard to the immediate social impacts of large-scale dam construction, the main issues are as follows: inappropriate resettlement, alterations in the lifestyle of people, the lowering of the standard of living, disregard for local people’s rights, identity and culture, and taking land and other natural resource tenure away from local people (Yu, 2003). The psychological trauma of resettlement is one of the biggest issues communities have to grapple with. Loss of landholdings, insufficient compensation, loss of access to natural resources like water and land, and cultural costs compounded with resettlement efforts that lower the standard of living of communities are among the immediate impacts (Adams, 2000; Urban et al., 2013). Other social and well-being effects are related to the change of the natural water flow and water availability downstream. This is relevant for people who depend on the river for water and food security, both in proximity to the dam site and farther away.

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