Catastrophe in Tibet

The Tibetan Plateau is home to vast glacial reserves, which amount to the largest store of fresh water outside the Arctic and the Antarctic. It is also the source of ten major Asian river systems-including the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of mainland China, the Mekong, Salween, and Irrawaddy rivers of Southeast Asia, and the Indus and Brahmaputra of South Asia - which supply water to nearly 20 per cent of the global population. And, now, it is the site of a slow-burning environmental calamity that is threatening the water security, ecological balance, and geopolitical stability of the entire Asian continent.

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For over two decades, China has been engaged in an aggressive and opaque dam-building spree, centered on — though not limited to - the Tibetan Plateau. Yet China’s government has refused to negotiate a water-sharing treaty with any of the downriver countries, which must suffer the consequences of their upstream neighbour’s whims.

Already, Chinese-built mega-dams near the Plateau’s border have brought water levels in the Mekong River to unprecedentedly low levels, with devastating effects on fisheries and livelihoods across Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. As the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam retreats - driven partly by Chinese dams — rice farmers are being forced to abandon their traditional livelihoods, instead farming shrimp or growing reeds.

Yet China’s dam ambitions continue to grow. The Three Gorges Dam, which runs along the Yangtze River, is the largest in the world. But it will be dwarfed by the dam China is now building on the Yarlung Zangbo river, also known as the Brahmaputra, in a seismically active region of the Tibetan Plateau. If completed, this project would drastically alter water flows into India and Bangladesh, threaten the region's food security and ecological balance, and increase China’s geopolitical leverage over downstream countries.