The project—the Grand Millennium Dam—has sparked worries
about environmental and human costs and is refocusing attention on the
country’s troubled history with large dams.
At a public ceremony in March, Ethiopian Prime Minister MelesZenawi laid the cornerstone
for the new dam, a hydroelectric power plant that will span a section of the
Blue Nile River in the country’s Benishangul-Gumuz
region.
The Blue Nile originates in Ethiopia’s Lake Tana and is one of two major tributaries of the Nile, the
world’s longest river.
When completed in 2015, the Grand Millennium Dam will be
the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa. It will also create the
country’s largest artificial lake, with a capacity of 63 billion cubic meters
of water—twice the size of Lake Tana in Ethiopia’s Amhara region.
In late June, Ethiopia announced that it would build four
additional dams on the Blue Nile that will work in conjunction with the Grand
Millennium Dam to generate more than 15,000 megawatts of electricity.
The cost of the four new dams has not been disclosed, but
the Grand Millennium Dam is estimated to cost about $4.7 billion.
Power Hub
Ethiopia has stated that it wants to become a major power
hub for Africa by generating hydropower electricity that it can sell to its
neighbors, and the country is in a unique position to succeed.
Ethiopia’s government says the bulk of the Nile dams’
generated electricity will be exported to neighboring countries, but Egypt and
Northern Sudan have expressed concern that the mega dam project could seriously
reduce the downstream water flow of the Nile River in their countries.
Conservationists also are worried about the Grand
Millennium Dam’s environmental impacts. To date, no environmental impact
assessment report, or EIA, for the project has been published and the country
has not indicated that any studies are planned.
This isn’t surprising, said International
Rivers spokesperson Lori Pottinger.
An EIA report that Ethiopia released in 2009 for Gibe
III—another large dam project on the country’s Omo
River that is currently under construction—was widely criticized as flawed and
inadequate and led the World Bank, European Investment Bank, and the African
Development Bank to pull out of the project in 2010.
Ethiopia may be seeking to avoid a similar public
backlash with the Grand Millennium Dam, but the lack of an EIA report has made
it difficult to raise international funds for the project, Pottinger
said.
Troubled Waters
Ethiopia also has a troubled history of large dam
projects that does not inspire confidence. The country’s dams have been linked
to the controversial government practice of “land grabs.”
The Ethiopian government, which owns all land in the
country, has been pushing tribal people off their ancestral lands and is
leasing large tracts of land to foreign interests, critics say.
“Since they have nowhere to go for alternative
survival, armed conflicts in the region are sharply rising,.”
Carr added.
According to a 2009 Africa Resources Working Group (ARWG)
report, the Gibe III dam could reduce the level of Lake Turkana by as much as
66 feet (20 meters) and affect as many as half a million people living in
Ethiopia and Kenya.
Such a drastic drop in water level would not only
threaten wildlife in the region—including hippopotamus, crocodiles, and migrant
waterfowl—but it would also increase the lake’s salinity because the salt
concentration in the lake increases as the water level drops, Carr said.
“Lake Turkana is already just borderline potable for
humans and livestock,” she added. “An increase in salinity would push
conditions over this limit, as well as disrupt the entire biology of the lake
itself.”
Charging Ahead
Despite its difficulty in soliciting foreign funds, the
government of Ethiopia has said it is committed to the Grand Millennium Dam and
that it plans to fund the project without foreign aid by selling bonds to the
public.
“The Ethiopian population has agreed to build the Grand
Millennium Dam. All workers are giving one month salary, traders are buying
bonds, the diaspora is contributing to the dam,” Ethiopian government
spokesperson Haji IbsaGendo
told Bloomberg News earlier this year.
But even if the Grand Millennium and Gibe III dams are
successfully completed, it’s still unclear who will buy their electricity.
According to the Sudan Tribune, Ethiopia has
“initial agreements” to export electricity to Sudan, Dijibouti, and Kenya. But dam critics say the majority of
Africans are not connected to the power grid, and that Ethiopia will be
generating far more electricity than it or its neighbors currently need.
“It’s anyone’s guess how they’re going to sell off
this electricity,” Pottinger said.
News reports indicate that South Sudan could also be a
potential buyer of Ethiopia’s electricity, but the situation is complicated by
a 1929 agreement that gives Egypt and Sudan rights over all of the Nile’s water–an
agreement that would now presumably include South Sudan and which Ethiopia and
several other African nations are challenging.
“Currently Sudan has a relatively large chunk of rights
to the Nile and it’s unclear how those are going to be divided, who they’re
going to side with, and what they’re going to want from Ethiopia,” Pottinger said. “I don’t think anybody can guess what’s
going to happen at this point.”
Climate Change
There is also a danger that some of Ethiopia’s dams will
become obsolete in a few decades as climate changes driven by global warming
alter hydrological cycles across eastern Africa.
One set of climate analyses, by UCSB’s Funk and his
colleagues, predicts that southern Ethiopia could experience as much as a 20
percent decline in rainfall in the coming decades as a result of changing
climate patterns. If this happens, it could threaten the electricity production
of Gibe III and other dams on the Omo River.
“Whether you believe my analysis of why the rainfall
is declining, certainly the observation suggests the decline is happening. You
can be an unbeliever in climate change and still be concerned that the rainfall
is going down,” Funk said.
According to International River’s Pottinger,
no dams in Ethiopia are being analyzed for the potential impacts of climate
change.
“This region of East Africa is already extremely
dependent on hydropower,” she said.
“When you combine that with the fact that Africa is
the continent that is supposed to be most affected by climate change, that’s
just a recipe for disaster.”
