Will the Mekong and Salween Pay the Price of China’s Energy Transition?

Picture: Mongabay

In an article by Mongabay, Carolyn Cowan examines the inadvertent consequences of energy transition on the Mekong and Salween rivers.

In a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment, Galelli and his colleagues from China and the U.S. evaluate how China’s plans to decarbonize its energy sector by 2060 could have inadvertent but severe impacts on local farmland and transboundary river basins, including the regionally significant Mekong and Salween. The researchers also consider how alternative solutions and new technologies could help minimize the most egregious impacts.

“Decarbonizing is essential, we have to do it,” Galelli told Mongabay. “But we must think about trade-offs with the environment now, rather than afterwards. Getting an understanding of what could come in the next 40 years can give us an indication of the least-impactful pathways and give us an opportunity to steer the boat.”

The authors say that strategies to reduce electricity demand combined with increased investment in emerging energy technologies could curb the need for further hydropower expansion in the upper stretches of the pivotal rivers, thereby reducing cascading downstream impacts.

The Yangtze and Mekong rivers “already carry the consequences of dam development, so one could easily foresee that the construction of new dams may exacerbate a variety of problems, such as the fragmentation of the river network, alteration of sediment and nutrient dynamics, obstruction of migratory routes of aquatic species, or hydrological alterations,” the study says.