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Lee Talbot in Laos looking over a home-made muzzle-loading rifle belonging
to one of the many hunters he encountered near the forest.
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International Dam Project Evaluations Benefit Countries and Science
By Lynn Burke
Environmental impact assessments are the norm for building projects within
the United States. They have also become the norm for World Bank projects. To
ensure that the assessments are objective, the World Bank brings together panels
of experts to provide independent advice and monitoring on major development projects.
Professor Lee Talbot, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, heads two
of these panels - one for the Nam Theun 2 hydropower project in Laos and one for
the Bujagali hydropower project in Uganda.
The panels comprise three to five people who are world-reknowned experts in
ecological and social-cultural matters. From the start of the project and on through
to operation, if the project is approved, the panels offer advice on how best
to take into account environmental and cultural considerations, says Talbot.
In the Laos project, Talbot found that the area that would be flooded by the
dam is already very degraded from biodiversity and human points of view. "Very
little would be lost if this were dammed," says Talbot. The area to be flooded
is part of a plateau that was carpet-bombed by the United States during the 1960s.
Later, a failed attempt to grow sugar cane removed more of the vegetation, and
now logging has taken care of the rest.
"When I was first there, I spent two days in a dugout canoe going through
all of the streams on the plateau that would be inundated," says Talbot. "Normally,
stream banks are the best place for bird life because of water and shelter and
so forth, but in two days, I saw only seven individual birds. The people are terribly
poor and were shooting or snaring everything they could - they had to." Resettlement
of the people who live there will offer them significant benefits, he explains.
On the other hand, the 4,500-square-kilometer area that would provide the
watershed essential for the success of the reservoir is incredibly valuable from
the standpoint of biodiversity and its cultural aspects, says Talbot. "I've worked
all over Southeast Asia since 1955, and I knew about the area back then," says
Talbot. "But no Westerners had gotten in at that time." When the panel began its
work, the Lao were starting to push in roads to log the area and it was possible
to stop that through the World Bank project, by making preservation of the watershed
a requirement for bank assistance.
To determine what is in the watershed, Talbot says that he and a handful of
other researchers spend about a month a year there, going in by helicopter and
being dropped off high in the mountains and then walking or rafting out. "It is
just magnificent forest country - it's unbelievable," he says. The forest, on the
west side of the Annamite Mountains on the border with Vietnam, runs from about
1,500 feet elevation up to 7,000 feet. At the bottom is a tropical pine forest
and as the elevation increases, a whole series of different tropical forest types
are found.
Talbot says that since 1992 the teams have come across creatures new to science.
The biggest one is a new genus, an ox-like mammal called a saola. In addition,
the teams have discovered three new deer species, a new pig species, a new hare
species, and one species they believe is a civet - that creature is being examined
at the British Museum of Natural History to see whether it is indeed new. Talbot
believes that the big species in the area have been pretty well discovered, but
a number of small new ones and many plants may yet be undiscovered.
The area also is rich in cultural resources, says Talbot. "We've been to places
where the local people told us no Europeans have been before so we're dealing
with people new to science as well as wildlife new to science." Approximately
20 distinct ethnic groups live in the watershed area.
"It's a real privilege to be able to get into such a pristine area in this
day and age," says Talbot. "It's an accident of topography and history." Because
the area is so rugged, the Ho Chi Minh Trail went around it, sparing it from the
devastation the rest of the country experienced during the Vietnam era.
"It's an extraordinary opportunity to be able to try to conserve this land
with its globally important biological and cultural riches," Talbot adds. "If
we're not successful, it will be logged because the logs represent such a tremendous
economic resource for the country, which is one of the poorest in the world."
Although the project is still awaiting final approval from the World Bank,
much has been done to help and work out resettlement for the few groups in the
area to be flooded. "It's one of the very few dam projects I think may be successful
from the standpoint of environment and human welfare."
In Uganda, Talbot heads the panel of experts for a project that involves damming
the Nile River about eight kilometers downstream from its start at Lake Victoria.
The Bujagali project, which the World Bank has approved, will create a power plant
for the country, whose economic development is limited by the lack of electricity.
For this project, Talbot and his team looked at the possible environmental
and cultural effects of the power plant and its transmission line, which would
run a hundred some kilometers to Kampala, the capital. Because the dam will only
back water up within the existing gorge and won't create a reservoir, Talbot believes
this project is fairly benign. The dam, however, will change the river from a
series of rapids to a flattened body of water behind the dam.
Four or five of the rapids are Class 5 rapids, considered the maximum for
whitewater rafting, and one is a Class 6 rapids. To determine how changing the
nature of the river would affect the ecosystem, Talbot needed to see what vegetation,
bird life, and so forth were on islands at the edge of the river. He arranged
for a raft and four professional oarsmen for the trip.
"Of course, the rationale is that you've got to do it for an ecological survey,
which is true enough, but I suppose the true reason was I wanted to go down those
rapids!" says Talbot. "So I landed on all those little islands and so forth and
went over all the rapids including the Class 6 one, which was awesome!"
Talbot says that the panels combine applied and some basic research and create
a win-win situation. "It is an opportunity to really improve the projects and
help ensure that if they're done, they're done in a responsible way. At the same
time, it's an opportunity to add to scientific knowledge and have fun."
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