- Major flooding along Mekong tributaries in northern Thailand has heightened scrutiny of plans to build a major hydropower dam spanning the pivotal watercourse over the border in Laos.
- Experts say the Pak Beng Dam would worsen severe seasonal flooding by elevating water levels upstream into the stretch of the Mekong that flows through northern Thailand.
- In 2023, Thailand’s national electricity authority signed an agreement to purchase electricity from the controversial scheme, essentially greenlighting the next phase of development.
- This week, farmers, activists and policymakers met in the flood-prone province of Chiang Rai to discuss the potential cross-border impacts of the dam, with many speakers urging the Thai government and Thailand-based investors to reconsider their support of the scheme due to the risks of the dam exacerbating devastating floods.
In the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi, communities in northern Thailand’s Chiang Rai province are taking stock of the toll wreaked by heavy rains and rising rivers. At least 33 people lost their lives in the country since mid-August amid hazardous conditions that devastated riverside homes, businesses and agricultural land.
The flooding has heightened public and policymaker scrutiny of plans to build a major hydropower dam spanning the Mekong River at Pak Beng in Oudomxay province in Laos. Experts warn the dam, situated 97 kilometers (60 miles) from the Thailand-Laos border, has the potential to elevate water levels in the mainstream Mekong and thus exacerbate seasonal flooding along key tributaries in Thailand.
Local communities and civil society groups have raised their concerns about the project for nearly a decade, claiming the developers and their Thailand-based investors have failed to consider the dam’s potential impacts on people living upstream.
Against this backdrop, policymakers, community leaders and local residents met Sept. 20-21 at a forum in the flood-stricken province of Chiang Rai to discuss the implications of the controversial development. The dialogue was part of an investigation by the Thai parliament’s Committee on Land, Natural Resources and the Environment into the potential cross-border impacts of the scheme.
Agricultural devastation
At the center of discussions were calls from farmers and village heads urging the government to consider how the Pak Beng Dam could affect people living alongside the Mekong and its major tributaries.
Phaithon Namchai, head of Yai Nuea village in Wiang Kaen district, said farmers along the Ngao River are at a loss following the inundation of more than 320 hectares (790 acres) of pomelo orchards. “They don’t know what to do now, they are scared to reinvest in the land if it will be flooded again in the future,” he said.
A major concern to the farming community is how the dam development is projected to raise the average water levels in the Mekong River. Should the dam be built and the reality of a fuller Mekong become the norm, they said that even normal levels of seasonal flooding in tributary rivers could result in catastrophic crop losses, as has happened over the past several weeks.
Besides the fruit orchards, swaths of rice, cassava, coconut and corn farms were still underwater several weeks after the peak of the floods when Mongabay visited the area in September. Farmers said they hadn’t seen such severe flooding in more than four decades, reporting that what killed their crops was the time it took for the floodwaters to subside, the cause of which they attributed to unseasonably high water levels in the mainstream Mekong: there was simply nowhere for the floodwaters to drain to.
Somsak Kemya, 48, grows pomelo trees close to where the Ngao flows into the Mekong in Wiang Khaen district. He told Mongabay the floodwaters killed scores of 7-year-old trees that had only recently begun to bear fruit, dashing his hopes of recouping the costs of raising them. “The level of the Mekong River was high, so there was nowhere for the water [from the tributary] to go. And this is without the Pak Beng Dam; what would happen if the dam is built? It might be even worse than this.”
Severe flooding had extended throughout the province since late August, even destroying homes along the Kok River in Chiang Rai city. Water levels in the mainstream Mekong itself peaked on Sept. 12, exceeding 12.5 meters (41 feet) in Chiang Khong district and surpassing historic highs.
Dam backwater will raise river levels
Niwat Roykaew, an environmental activist from the Rak Chiang Khong Conservation Group, said the high water levels in the Mekong River are heavily influenced by the operation of dams upstream in China, and questioned the sense in building more large-scale dams that will further complicate the picture.
“In the past, when it rained a lot and the Ing River flooded, it drained away quickly. But now look at what happens,” Niwat said. “Think about how difficult it will be for the Mekong River to flow out if the [Pak Beng] dam is built and the water level will rise higher.”
Even though the Pak Beng Dam is located 97 km from Thailand’s border with Laos, experts say that once the dam is built, a “backwater” effect will raise the water level upstream.
Somnuck Jongmeewasin, technical adviser to the parliament’s environmental committee and research director at Thailand-based NGO EEC Watch, said hydrological surveys to date indicate that the Pak Beng Dam’s backwater effect will impact a 285-km (177-mi) stretch of the Mekong upstream of the dam, spanning the entire stretch of the river that borders northern Thailand.
Crucially, the dam will cause the water level upstream to exceed flooding levels by 6 m (20 ft), according to Somnuck. “This means that we are building a dam that will create flooding,” he said. “So why do we want to build it? It makes no sense.”
Beyond the heightened risk of flooding, Somnuck said the environmental and the social impact assessments of the scheme have been woefully inadequate. An independent review of the project’s environmental impact assessment that was prepared in 2015 by the National Consulting Group of Laos on behalf of the developers, found it relied heavily on outdated data and lacked fisheries, sediment flow, water quality, climate change and public participation considerations.
“We cannot really call it an EIA, it lacks so many key considerations that an EIA should include,” Somnuck said.
Benja Saengchan, a member of the parliamentary committee, said they would take all the comments into full consideration and submit a summary report within one month to the cabinet for its consideration. She said all dimensions of the discussions with residents will be included, from energy needs to national security, agriculture, fishery and project consultation shortcomings.
A controversial project
The Pak Beng development, co-owned by China Datang Overseas Investment and Thailand-based Gulf Energy Development, is slated to have an installed capacity of 912 megawatts and is due to sell all of its energy to EGAT, the Thai electricity authority, which will then transmit it to end buyers in Malaysia and Singapore.
Hydropower dams have sparked heated disputes in the Mekong Basin for decades. There are currently more than 160 along the river and its tributaries, including 13 that span the river’s entire mainstream channel. With nine further mainstream projects, including Pak Beng, in various stages of planning in Laos and Cambodia, the pace of damming continues unabated despite the risks to the environment and community livelihoods.
The relentless damming has altered the river’s crucial seasonal flood pulse that drives regional fisheries and agricultural productivity, with implications for the lives and livelihoods of millions of basin residents. Dams also disrupt sediment flows and sever fish migration routes, jeopardizing ecosystems and freshwater wildlife unique to the region. According to a May 2024 report by financial watchdog Fair Finance Asia, the impacts of dams on communities and ecosystems could amount to $145 billion by 2040.
Rights groups have repeatedly raised the fact that most of the mainstream schemes are largely motivated by the prospect of selling energy to regional neighbors like Malaysia and Singapore, rather than serving public energy needs in the countries where riverside communities will bear the impacts of the development, such as Thailand and Laos.
However, halting potentially harmful developments is hampered by the Mekong Basin’s outdated governance structure, which is based on the 1995 Mekong Agreement between the four lower basin countries of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The agreement isn’t legally binding and doesn’t allow any national government the power to veto projects on the river, even if deemed harmful to the river and its resources.
As a result, dams have typically been built on a project-by-project basis, with decisions focused more on the availability of funding and power purchase agreements, rather than a sincere assessment of the cumulative impacts of dams or whether the dam is actually required in the first place.
When it comes to the Pak Beng scheme, Thailand’s national electricity authority signed a power purchase agreement with the developers in September 2023, prompting rights groups to question the commitment to buy the electricity from the scheme before a proper EIA had been conducted and before cross-border impacts had been clarified.
The Pak Beng project is now securing loans from financial institutions, with the closing date expected by the end of 2024. As part of the loan agreement phase, the developers announced at the 14th Mekong River Commission stakeholder forum in June their intention to complete further environmental and social impact assessments, including transboundary evaluations, to inform the final design stages.
Somnuck, the adviser to the parliamentary committee, said the developers have hired a Thai firm, TEAM Consulting, to conduct this next phase of impact assessments, but it has yet to share any information about its plans or approach. Somnuck called on TEAM to openly collaborate with the committee and to proceed with openness and transparency. “It’s very important to know what information they are using to finalize the design of the development,” he said.
Pianporn Deetes, regional campaign director of International Rivers, urged Thai banks that are considering financing the Pak Beng project to heed the environmental and human rights consequences of their investments in such projects and to uphold their commitments to sustainable banking policies and practices when deciding whether to support the project.
“This dam is not for developing electricity for the needs of the public, it is for producing profit for only a few people,” Pianporn said. “There is still hope that the outcry of the affected communities can be heard. We can see clearly [from the recent floods] that the affected communities are not only those living right on the Mekong River, but also those in the flood-prone areas deep into the tributaries.”
Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on 𝕏, @CarolynCowan11.
Banner image: Flooding along the Kok River, a Mekong tributary, in Chiang Saen district. Image courtesy of Rak Chiang Khong Conservation Group/International Rivers.
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