Recording available: Climate Crisis in Tibet – Part II: Dam Construction & Tibet as a Hydropower Zone: Implications on Tibet’s Climate Crisis?
In recent years, China’s territorial aggression in the Himalayas, including in the Tibetan Plateau, has been growing. China’s strategy has focused mainly on using the continental version of the well-known “salami tactics” on neighbors like India and Bhutan. Notably, Tibet is a major source of insecurity for the Chinese ruling regime, namely the Communist Party of China (CPC). In Tibet, apart from the build-up of the people’s Liberation Army (PLA) and its activities to pursue Tibetan repression in the restive provinces, the CPC’s stress is also on accelerating infrastructure development, from building mega-dams to mining activities.
Naturally, as a number of rivers originate in Tibet and as most are often trans-boundary rivers (Brahmaputra; Mekong; and Salween, the second-longest river in Southeast Asia after the Mekong where thus far no dams, have been completed] to name a few), the environmental impact will be borne heavily by Tibet and the lower riparian countries like India, Bangladesh, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. One of the CPC’s strategies to control access to water for China “hydro-hegemony” purposes.
The repercussions are already beginning to show: In Southeast Asia, farmers and fishers across the Mekong River region experienced debilitating droughts in 2020 itself. Research has shown that this was directly due to Chinese engineers actively working to limit the river’s flow. Notably, China’s over-damming of Tibetan rivers has been pursued under a faulty assumption of the seismic potential on the Tibetan Plateau. Increased seismic activity could impact the structural integrity of the dams, further threatening the geological equilibrium and potentially causing damage to cultural heritage sites built along the rivers.