Dams and Dilemmas: The Human and Ecological Costs

Just before the end of 2024, Chinese state media Xinhua slipped out an announcement – the long discussed mega-dam in Medog County, Tibet, has been greenlit. When built, it will generate three times more energy than China’s Three Gorges dam, currently the largest in the world.

The Xinhua write-up gave few other details, but the news has caused reverberations across Asia as the river on which the dam would be built, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into both India and Bangladesh. The existence of the dam could, as we will hear in this episode, have extensive impact on these downriver countries.

To break down the complicated water politics of the region, I’m joined today by Chinese Whispers regular, the journalist Isabel Hilton, who founded the climate NGO Dialogue Earth (formerly known as China Dialogue); and Neeraj Singh Manhas, an expert on transboundary rivers and Asian water politics, currently at South Korea’s Parley Policy Initiative.