THE COLLAPSE OF AN ARTERY

The livelihoods and cultures of the 60 million people living in the Lower Mekong Basin are intimately
connected with the river’s natural cycles. Boasting one of the world’s most diverse and productive
inland fisheries, the Mekong supplies its people with about 80% of their protein needs. Yet this
beautiful, dynamic and thriving river system is under threat.

The region’s governments and various foreign interests have plans to construct scores of hydropower dams
on the Mekong and its tributaries. Laos, in its bid to become “the battery of Southeast Asia,” hopes to
develop more than 30 dams on Mekong tributaries and four huge projects on the currently undammed mainstream
of the lower part of the river. Vietnam is building multiple-dam cascades on several Mekong tributaries,
and Cambodia is also hoping to build dams on tributaries and the mainstream. These dams, such as Pak Mun
(Thailand) and Theun Hinboun (Laos), would mean death by a thousand cuts to the river’s rich fisheries and
the people who depend upon them.

Text: Patrick McKully
Photography and captions: Francesca Casciarri and Eirik Linder Aspelund / CALIAS PHOTO

Half a million people live along the Lower Omo in remote southwestern Ethiopia and around Lake Turkana
in northern Kenya which receives the Omo’s waters. The crops, livestock and fisheries of at least eight
distinct indigenous communities in Ethiopia are supported by the river’s seasonal rise and fall, which
is currently being threatened by the construction of the massive Gibe 3 Dam.

The project’s US$1.7 billion construction contract was awarded without competition to the Italian
construction giant Salini, raising serious questions about the potential for corruption. In addition,
the rights of the communities of the Lower Omo Valley under both Ethiopian and international laws have
been abused, leaving their livelihoods and communities at great risk.

Without adequate mitigation, Gibe 3 Dam will diminish the quality of life for much of the population of
the Lower Omo and Lake Turkana, create hunger, poor health, and food aid dependence, and cause resource
conflicts and a general unraveling of the region’s social structure.

Text: Terri Hathaway
Photography: Brent Stirton

The shrinking of the delta – by as much as 90% – has seriously harmed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

Once the fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has in the last five decades lost more than three-quarters of its area and two-thirds of its volume.

To grow cotton and rice, the Soviet Government built dams and canals diverting the water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, which once sustained the sea. Ports that once supported transport, fishing and fish canning industries, are now landlocked and lie abandoned some 60-130 km from the shore.

The wind carries dust, salts and pesticide residues from the dried-up seabed throughout the region, causing serious health problems. The infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world. The image of rusting boats abandoned in the desert has become a symbol of the environmental and human disaster caused by the irrational use of water.

THE DISAPPEARING LAKE

Lake Chad was one of the largest lakes in the world, but climate change and the massive
diversion of its waters for huge irrigation projects has reduced its surface area from
26,000 square km in 1960 to 900 square km by 2006. It will completely disappear is a
matter of a few decades if no solution is found.

The lack of water has caused a human catastrophe that has many faces. It has greatly
reduced the fish stocks, a basic element in the local diet. The water has gone to be
replaced by hunger. The population has crowded into the towns and fight for the scant
resources. Problems arise, violence ensues. Frontier conflicts over water rights have
increased tension in the area.

There is an ongoing plan to regenerate the lakes ecosystems that is based in the integral
management of the water table. There are also plans to recover the traditional cultivation
techniques, the efficiency of which have been proven over millennia. Without the need of
expensive infrastructures these methods could solve the most urgent issue, hunger.

Text: Marisancho Menjón
Photography: Cédric Faimali