There was little question who was in cost. Arriving intentionally late to our assembly in Jaja village on the ocean shore of the Rufiji delta in southern Tanzania, Dia Kiyonga toured the room, shaking fingers with the guests, her blue gown flowing. She was Jaja’s mangroves boss, in spite of everything. And mangroves are in all places and every part right here.
The creeks and mudbanks of the Rufiji delta are house to the most important steady stand of mangroves in East Africa, protecting 210 sq. miles. The one query in my thoughts was: for the way for much longer?
For, unknown to Kiyonga and her 12,000 fellow villagers on the delta, the federal government was about to let contracts to construct what some environmentalists are calling probably the most environmentally disastrous dams ever constructed in Africa.
The Jaja I visited three years in the past was a vibrant group, two hours by boat from the closest highway, however with an airstrip, an Arab dhow on the jetty, a soccer pitch, TV dishes and photo voltaic panels nestled on many tin roofs, and the sound of a motorcycle and digital music echoing via the timber to the sandy seashore on the Indian Ocean.
I used to be touring the delta with the Netherlands-based NGO Wetlands Worldwide, documenting how delta communities akin to Jaja handle their mangroves and the way they do it so nicely that, regardless of intensive harvesting, the mangroves have elevated in extent from 150 sq. miles within the mid-20th century to greater than 200 sq. miles in current occasions.
The dam could develop into probably the most environmentally damaging hydro tasks ever constructed in Africa.
Kiyonga was eager to elucidate. “We have now six several types of mangroves right here,” she mentioned. Completely different species have been utilized by villagers to construct their homes and kindle fires, to make fences, beehives, fishing floats, and poles for pounding grain, in addition to to fabricate dyes, medicines, and alcohol from fermented sap. In the meantime, their roots within the silty waters harbored breeding fish and prevented erosion by the ocean waves.
“They’re rising as a result of we’re taking higher care of them,” she informed me. “We have now areas the place we harvest, areas the place we don’t, and space the place we plant”
However their stewardship might quickly be in useless, for the month after my go to, the Tanzanian authorities confirmed plans to construct Africa’s second-largest hydroelectric dam in a gorge 100 miles upstream on the Rufiji River, signing a contract with an Egyptian state-owned engineering firm, Arab Contractors. It’s set for completion later this yr.
Environmental scientists warn that the $3.6 billion dam can have a devastating affect on the delta — all however ending the river’s wet-season floods, which usher in freshwater and silt. The mangroves will die; the fish will disappear; and the delta itself will begin to be eroded by the ocean. Coastal villages akin to Jaja would be the first to go. However the folks of Jaja and others throughout the delta that I visited had by no means heard of the dam plan, a lot much less been consulted.
The Stiegler’s Gorge dam could develop into probably the most environmentally damaging hydroelectric tasks ever constructed in Africa.
A boatman rows previous mangroves within the Rufiji delta.
Fred Pearce
The challenge immediately threatens two giant protected areas. The Selous Sport Reserve, during which the dam is being constructed and its reservoir is located, is a UNESCO World Heritage website virtually twice the scale of Massachusetts and extensively thought to be one among Africa’s best, largest, and most pristine wilderness areas. And the Rufiji delta is a component of a bigger coastal wetland space often known as the Rufiji-Mafia-Kilma Seascape, acknowledged for its worldwide significance below the Ramsar Conference.
“It’s unprecedented to threat shedding the integrity of not one, however two globally vital protected areas to a hydropower challenge,” writes Joerg Hartmann, a Colorado-based water and power guide aware of the challenge.
However with native activists dealing with threats of jail in the event that they criticize the dam, few folks exterior Tanzania have heard in regards to the unfolding calamity.
The concrete-and-rock dam, 430 toes excessive and a couple of,300 toes huge, barricades the Rufiji River because it leaves the five-mile lengthy Stiegler’s Gorge and enters a 100-mile-long floodplain of shifting riverbeds, marshes, lakes, and mangroves that results in the Indian Ocean.
With an put in capability of two,100 megawatts, the dam will likely be as highly effective as Egypt’s Excessive Aswan Dam on the Nile and exceeded in Africa solely by the just lately accomplished Grand Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia. It’ll maintain again a reservoir 62 miles lengthy and greater than seven miles huge on common.
Map exhibiting the Stiegler’s Gorge Dam and the large reservoir being created behind it.
Tanzanian Affairs
Critics say that whereas the reservoir will solely immediately inundate round 2 p.c of the enormous Selous reserve, it can obliterate key wetlands and block migration routes utilized by a lot of its 750,000 giant mammals, which belong to 57 species, together with elephants, black rhinos, cheetahs, buffaloes, crocodiles, giraffes, and hippos. In the meantime, the buildout of roads, energy traces, development camps, and different infrastructure wanted for the challenge is already resulting in an upsurge in poaching and intensive deforestation. In preparation for development, the Tanzanian Forest service contracted the clearance of two.6 million timber from 570 sq. miles of forest.
As development work acquired below method in 2019, officers at UNESCO really helpful that the Selous reserve be delisted as a World Heritage website, due to the dam. However at a gathering of the group’s World Heritage Committee final June, the Tanzanian authorities rallied fellow African governments to veto the delisting, no less than for now.
Concern in regards to the destiny of Selous has distracted consideration from what specialists say is arguably a fair better risk to the floodplain and delta ecosystems downstream, on which some 200,000 folks rely for his or her livelihoods.
Regardless of two smaller dams on tributaries, the Rufiji is “basically the final main comparatively free-flowing river in East Africa,” in keeping with Barnaby Dye of the College of Manchester. When accomplished, the dam will finish that. It will likely be capable of maintain again round a yr’s river circulate. And if operated to maximise hydroelectric energy era — which Dye says seems to be the intention of its state-owned operator, the Tanzania Electrical Provide Firm (TANESCO) — it can largely halt the wet-season flood of water and sediment that maintains lakes wealthy in fish, in addition to fertilizing fields and sustaining the mangrove-covered delta.
An elephant crossing the Rufiji River in Tanzania’s Selous Sport Reserve.
Philip Sport / Alamy Inventory Photograph
“Floodplain lakes will now not be linked to the river and [will] dry out, and the delta and seashores will likely be topic to erosion,” writes Hartmann. Salty seawater will invade earlier freshwater areas of the delta. Fields nourished by annual flooding from the river will lose silt and vitamins, he provides.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says the dam will entice many of the estimated 16.6 million tons of sediment that circulate down the river every year. With out that silt provide, “the river mattress will deepen, river banks will collapse,” warns Hartmann. And the delta will likely be eroded away by the ocean, says Kjell Havnevik, a improvement researcher on the College of Agder in Norway, who names shoreline delta villages Jaja, Mbwera, and Pombwe as at specific threat of being washed away.
In principle the federal government ought to be alerted to such dangers via its legally required environmental impacts evaluation (EIA), revealed in 2018, and a strategic environmental evaluation (SEA) accomplished the next yr. However each government-commissioned reviews have been extensively condemned as imprecise, biased, technically insufficient, and predicated on the belief that the challenge should go forward regardless.
The EIA claims, for example, that water releases from the dam could be adequate “to maintain the floodplain lakes linked to the Rufiji River for many of the months of the yr and thus maintain floodplain fish manufacturing,” and would “alter the geochemistry of the delta in favor of sustaining the optimum stability of salinity regime to make sure ecological integrity of the delta.”
However neither declare was backed up with proof, and Yale Setting 360 couldn’t discover unbiased specialists who agreed with them.
Building work on the Stiegler’s Gorge dam.
Elsewedy Electrical
Hartmann, who has drawn up environmental tips for the Worldwide Hydropower Affiliation and who labored in Tanzania for a number of years, says the EIA exhibits “no critical technical evaluation of downstream impacts,” which he says was “an irresponsible and unforgivable mistake. In comparison with worldwide good observe in hydropower, that is an unacceptably superficial degree of data.”
A evaluation of the SEA for the Worldwide Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) discovered that it “falls far in need of regular requirements … for tasks of this magnitude and complexity” and “doesn’t present a sound foundation for decision-making.” A declare within the EIA that the dam would carry advantages for downstream communities by lowering harmful floods “just isn’t based mostly on credible reasoning or proof,” in keeping with a separate IUCN-backed evaluation. The IUCN has known as on the federal government to “completely abandon” the challenge.
None of this criticism ought to have come as a shock to the Tanzanian authorities, least of all to the creator of the EIA, Raphael Mwalyosi of the Institute of Useful resource Evaluation on the College of Dar es Salaam. Again in 1988, as a younger biologist, he warned that “essentially the most vital impact” of constructing a dam in Stiegler’s gorge could be a “drastic discount” in flood flows downstream. “Floodplain fisheries would completely collapse,” he wrote. “Some mangrove stands within the delta would most likely be displaced by reeds.”
Mwalyosi didn’t reply to emailed requests for touch upon whether or not, or why, his view had modified.
The dam might push many Rufiji floodplain inhabitants to the brink of survival, one skilled warns.
Authorities officers knew too. When Tanzania efficiently nominated the Rufiji delta as a part of the Rufiji-Mafia-Kilma Ramsar website in 2004, its Ministry of Pure Assets famous {that a} dam at Stiegler’s Gorge would “have extreme impacts on the ecological stability downstream,” damaging biodiversity, fisheries, and livelihoods.
However the urge to construct the dam — first proposed by German colonial engineer Franz Stiegler greater than a century in the past — has refused to die. It turned a trigger celebre of President John Magufuli after his inauguration in 2015. He noticed it as a significant supply of electrical energy to propel his nation’s financial advance. He rejected these, akin to Hartmann, who famous the nation already suffers energy outages when droughts hobble two different hydro vegetation within the Rufiji basin and defined that Tanzania has options, together with “glorious photo voltaic and wind potential, situated near load heart and transmission infrastructure.”
To assist mitigate downstream impacts, hydrologists have mentioned that any dam on the Rufiji ought to be operated to permit releases of water and silt throughout the moist season, proposing a circulate of two,500 cubic meters per second.
However Dye argues that the proposed seasonal launch is just too meager and that “the vast majority of downstream lakes will likely be minimize off and would subsequently dry up or lose their potential to maintain fish.” Stephanie Duvail of the Institute of Analysis for Improvement in Marseilles, France concludes there could be “a huge effect on the livelihoods of the Rufiji floodplain inhabitants, doubtlessly pushing many individuals to the brink of survival.” She discovered that with out the river flooding farmland, crop yields would drop in half inside three years.
A pc rendering of the finished Stiegler’s Gorge dam.
Elsewedy Electrical
TANESCO didn’t reply to requests for touch upon both the potential downstream impacts of its dam or the potential of guaranteeing moist season releases of water and silt.
Moderately than participating with such issues or searching for much less damaging sources of energy, Magufili’s authorities has sought to close down debate. In mid-2018, environmental minister Kangi Lugola warned that anybody who resisted the challenge could be jailed.
The warnings have been heeded. One NGO chief within the nation informed Yale e360, “It is a extremely delicate matter, and most NGOs didn’t need to become involved additional, regardless of opposing the dam.” After making early criticisms of the challenge, WWF Worldwide largely ceased making statements in 2019, and a spokesman confirmed that its nationwide workplace in Tanzania has stored totally silent.
Magufuli died in March final yr, however his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, has pushed on with the challenge.
When requested if, with the dam virtually constructed, now could be the time to marketing campaign for optimum downstream flows, officers at two main environmental NGOs working within the nation declined to contain themselves, for concern of offending the federal government.
So, by the tip of this yr, it appears possible that the finished dam will start filling Steigler’s Gorge with water. The downstream ecosystems and the individuals who rely upon them will await their destiny.