Rivers of Power by Laurence C. Smith

Author:Laurence C. Smith [C. Smith, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Rivers in China and Southeast Asia are being engineered at a massive scale. Highlighted here are China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Project (with east, central, and western routes), shunting water from the Yangtze River basin northward; the Three Gorges Dam; and a cascade of new dams completed or planned down the Mekong River through China, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia.

With a half-century building plan and an estimated cost of at least $77 billion, China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Project will take longer to build and cost more than the Three Gorges Dam. When complete, it will interconnect the Yangtze with the Yellow, Huai, and Hai River basins and divert some 45 billion cubic meters of water annually from southern to northern China. To put that number into perspective, California’s State Water Project and Central Valley Project combined deliver fewer than 14 billion cubic meters annually. China’s massive, multipronged diversion will approximate the flow of a new, artificial Yellow River, flowing from south to north through the country.

In central and western Africa, an ambitious grand diversion scheme called Transaqua is edging closer to reality. Its master plan envisages diverting water nearly 1,500 miles out of the Congo River basin and into the Chari River, which flows to Lake Chad. It would dig a long navigable canal and build a series of hydropower dams in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. Around 50 billion cubic meters of water would be transferred annually, roughly half of it through an 830-mile artificial canal.

One of the motivations for Transaqua is saving Lake Chad. Once a thriving freshwater ecosystem and a major source of livelihood for millions, Lake Chad has suffered severe desiccation from local irrigation diversions and declining rainfall. Since the early 1960s, this vast lake has shriveled by 90 percent—from 22,000 square kilometers to less than a thousand. The resulting losses of fish, cattle, and crops has created food insecurity and bleak socioeconomic conditions, making the region vulnerable to extremist political movements. Boko Haram, a religious militant group notorious for mass abductions of high school girls, has established a stronghold insurgency in northeastern Nigeria where the shrinkage of Lake Chad has created a truly desperate situation. While the proposed diversion of Congo water would not restore Lake Chad, it could stabilize its area at around 7,500 square kilometers while irrigating up to 70,000 square kilometers of farmland in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria.

Saving a piece of Lake Chad is only one objective of Transaqua. The project’s boosters point to its hydropower dams, which would bring badly needed electricity to the region. They applaud its fully navigable waterway, which would help ten mostly landlocked African countries gain better access to one another. They envision a grand new development corridor along this river diversion, with collateral benefits for the region’s transportation, agriculture, energy, and industry.

In 2018, Transaqua was the focus of a major summit in Abuja, Nigeria, attended by international backers and enthusiastic presidents from Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Niger, and Nigeria.

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