The Stream, August 7, 2024: $1.7B Mekong River Canal Breaks Ground, Stirring Environmental and Subsistence Concerns

Boats ply the waters of the Mekong River Delta, near Can Tho, Vietnam. Home to about 65 million people across four countries, the lower Mekong is also prized for its diversity of aquatic species. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

YOUR GLOBAL RUNDOWN

Hotter, wetter summers in South Korea are offering farmers the opportunity to cultivate tropical crops, including banana and other fruit trees, in large quantities.
Cambodia has announced a $1.7 billion project to build a canal connecting the Mekong River with the Gulf of Thailand.
More than a decade after two dams on the Amazon River’s largest tributary began operations, fishers in Brazil’s Humaitá municipality grapple with lighter harvests and changing diets.
In a new analysis of samples collected from England’s rivers and groundwater, nearly 500 chemicals — most of which are toxic or banned — have been found.

Correctional facilities in Alaska, vulnerable to extreme flooding, rainfall, and permafrost thaw, are being highlighted as the intersection of climate preparedness and criminal justice reform.

“As the climate changes, we will be spending more and more money on aging infrastructure. Which takes us full circle back to: ‘What if we had fewer people in prison, so that then we had less prisons to continually update and maintain?’” — Megan Edge, director of the ACLU of Alaska’s Prison Project.

Environmental and criminal reform advocates in Alaska are finding common ground in places where the ground itself is the issue — state-run infrastructure, namely prisons, built atop thawing permafrost and in areas exposed to landslides and glacial outburst floods, the Guardian reports.

Alaska has a per capita incarceration rate well above the national average, at 718 per 100,000 people and it is uniquely exposed to the throes of a warming planet. Glacial melting is expected to cause $93 million in damages to Department of Corrections facilities, according to a state assessment. Further thawing, increased rainfall, and other climate change impacts threaten to incur additional costs for a department whose current fiscal year budget exceeds $450 million, and whose critics say has done little to plan for environmental changes.

Some see reducing the state’s prison population as the most pertinent solution for both criminal reform and climate preparedness. In 2016, the Alaska leadership “passed a series of reforms to cut its prison population by at least 13 percent, with a projected savings of $380 million over the next decade,” however in 2019 most of these acts were rolled back.

— Christian Thorsberg, Interim Stream Editor

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The Lead

A $1.7 billion canal project linking the Mekong River with the Gulf of Thailand broke ground this week, though its construction is marked with environmental and political uncertainty.

The Mekong is one of the world’s most dammed rivers — more than 60 hydropower dams operate on the main stem and its tributaries, Mongabay reported last year. But it’s also a vital ecosystem — more than a quarter of the world’s freshwater fish catch comes from the waterway.

Residents living along the 110-mile stretch of the future canal, many of whom depend on the river for their business and subsistence lifestyles, have been told they will need to move. In the Mekong Delta, millions of farmers and fishers will see their livelihoods put at risk. Experts say not enough about the project is currently known to forecast such impacts.

Due to be completed in 2028, the project has been called a “nationalist endeavor” by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, whose father, former Prime Minister Hun Sen, first conceived of the canal. Because the project is partially funded by China, regional nations are additionally concerned about the Mekong being used for warship traffic and military movement.

This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers

500

The rough number of different chemicals discovered in 171 rivers and groundwater catchments tested throughout England. More than half of the chemicals have been “classed as very toxic, toxic or harmful to aquatic life, with 20 categorized as ‘substances of very high concern,’” the Guardian reports. Banned substances, including neonicotinoid pesticides, were found across 29 rivers and catchments, while fluoranthene and pyrene — toxic to most aquatic life and which resist breaking down — were found in 80 percent of the water bodies tested. Around 30 percent of the chemicals accumulated from agricultural runoff. Nick Measham, the CEO of WildFish, said: “It ties together chemical presence with widespread ecological impact. It makes poo in rivers look like a second-order problem.”

1,406

Number of fish species that have been cataloged in the Madeira basin, the Amazon River’s largest tributary and an aquatic biodiversity hotspot. But their migrations and behavior have been disrupted by the installation of two hydroelectric plants in the channel in the past 12 years, “reducing the annual catch of fishers by 39 percent” in the municipality of Humaitá, before and after the dams’ construction, Mongabay reports. Sudden changes in water levels — so-called “flood-and-dry events” — and irregular pulsing are cited as causing fish deaths. Market prices for fish are rising — for some catch, seven-fold — and changing the diets of local communities.

On the Radar

Warmer summer temperatures and wetter monsoon seasons, both results of climate change, are offering farmers in South Korea the opportunity to experiment with growing tropical crops, Reuters reports. From 2021 to 2023, the country’s cultivation of subtropical plants — mainly bananas and fruit trees — jumped from 295 hectares to 3,306 hectares. Last year was South Korea’s hottest on record, while rainfall during the monsoon was nearly double the annual average.

More Water News

Kerala state: Days of torrential rains in the southern Indian state resulted in multiple landslides in the Wayanad district, killing at least 144 people and displacing more than 8,000 people, the New York Times reports. In addition to the area’s heavy precipitation and steep geography, “new construction and irrigation methods used by farmers have also compromised the natural drainage system,” S. Sreekumar, a geologist, told the Times.

DCPA Pesticide: For the first time in nearly 40 years, the U.S. EPA has issued an emergency order to stop the use of the pesticide, which has been linked to serious health risks for pregnant farmworkers and their unborn babies, the Washington Post reports.

Christian Thorsberg

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer from Chicago. He is passionate about climate and cultural phenomena that often appear slow or invisible, and he examines these themes in his journalism, poetry, and fiction.