Hydropower

“Hey Rupam, open the door. Take this fish,” a woman yelled from outside. I was sitting in the kitchen at my friend Rupam’s house in rural northeast India. It was the heart of monsoon season, and rain had been falling since morning. The woman must have been shouting because the noise of the rain on the tin roof muted everything else. The aunty who lived next door stood outside with a large bowl of Boriala fish. Her husband had gone fishing on the Subansiri River, which flows next to the village, and he had fished all evening. “My husband cannot stay indoors in this weather,” she said in Assamese, the local language. “You can catch a lot of fish during this time.” The monsoon season has long brought a bounty of fish from May to September for people living downstream. However, this is likely to change once the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project, one of the largest hydropower dams in India, is completed upstream. Expected to be fully op...

The U.S. has a long record of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition, but a decision by federal energy regulators to deny permits for seven proposed hydropower projects suggests that tide may be turning. As the U.S. shifts from fossil fuels to clean energy, developers are looking for sites to generate electricity from renewable sources. But in an unexpected move, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission denied permits on Feb. 15, 2024, for seven proposed hydropower projects in Arizona and New Mexico. The reason: These projects were located within the Navajo Nation and were proposed without first consulting with the tribe. FERC said it was “establishing a new policy that the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit.” We are a cultural anthropologist and a water resource geographer who have studied tensions between...

Southeast Asia’s Mekong may be the most important river in the world. Known as the “mother of waters,” it is home to the world’s largest inland fishery, and the huge amounts of sediments it transports feed some of the planet’s most fertile farmlands. Tens of millions of people depend on it for their livelihoods. But how valuable is it in monetary terms? Is it possible to put a dollar value on the multitude of ecosystem services it provides, to help keep those services healthy into the future? That’s what my research colleagues and I are trying to figure out, focusing on two countries that hold the river’s most productive areas for fishing and farming: Cambodia and Vietnam. Understanding the value of a river is essential for good management and decision-making, such as where to develop infrastructure and where to protect nature. This is particularly true of the Mekong, which has come under enormous pressure in recent years from overfishi...

A 23-year western drought has drastically shrunk the Colorado River, which provides water for drinking and irrigation for Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and two states in Mexico. Under a 1922 compact, these jurisdictions receive fixed allocations of water from the river – but now there’s not enough water to provide them. As states try to negotiate ways to share the decreasing flow, the U.S. Department of the Interior is considering cuts of up to 25% in allotments for California, Nevada and Arizona. The federal government can regulate these states’ water shares because they come mainly from Lake Mead, the largest U.S. reservoir, which was created when the Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River near Las Vegas. These five articles from The Conversation’s archive explain what’s happening and what’s at stake in the Colorado River basin’s drought crisis. The Colorado River prov...

As Western states haggle over reducing water use because of declining flows in the Colorado River Basin, a more hopeful drama is playing out in Glen Canyon. Lake Powell, the second-largest U.S. reservoir, extends from northern Arizona into southern Utah. A critical water source for seven Colorado River Basin states, it has shrunk dramatically over the past 40 years. An ongoing 22-year megadrought has lowered the water level to just 22.6% of “full pool,” and that trend is expected to continue. Federal officials assert that there are no plans to drain Lake Powell, but overuse and climate change are draining it anyway. As the water drops, Glen Canyon – one of the most scenic areas in the U.S. West – is reappearing. This landscape, which includes the Colorado River’s main channel and about 100 side canyons, was flooded starting in the mid-1960s with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. The area’s stunning beauty and unique...