2.6 Conclusion
Chinese government and dam proponents intended to make the TGDP a showcase of China’s ‘opening and reform’ policy. They have assured Chinese publics and the rest of the world that the Three Gorges Dam will be environmentally friendly, economically profitable, and socially compatible. They believe that the TGP plays a major role in meeting the growing development demands for flood control, navigation, irrigation and water supply with relatively low operational and maintenance costs. Also, more importantly, they argue that the Three Gorges Dam present a better environmentally friendly solution to meet China’s growing energy demands, through allegedly renewable hydropower, rather than through coal or gas-based power generation plants. However, this is not the full picture that the Three Gorges Dam renders since its commence of construction in 1993. The reasons which officials use to push the dam through are functionally contradictory and their prohibitively demand for capital, and their inevitable negative environmental and social impacts, which are difficult to quantify in monetary terms, face growing opposition by environmental groups and general public. These negative impacts include: the inundation of huge tracts of valuable farmland and the destruction of natural habitat and loss of wildlife; reservoir sedimentation and downstream erosion; reservoir-induced seismicity; water quality deterioration in the reservoir as well as the tributaries; spread of stagnant water borne disease; adverse effects on cultural heritage, and environmental degradation and many millions of people suffering as a result of resettlement problems and dam failure (Oliver-Smith, 2001; Ledec & Quintero, 2003). Displacement tears up social networks, breaks up living patterns, threatens their cultural identity and causes host-resettler tensions, and resentment (Stojanov & Novosak, 2006). It breaks existing modes of agricultural productivity, deteriorates the land scarcity, causes the impoverishment among those displaced, and increases the risks of health and epidemics (Robinson, 2003; Stojanov & Novosak, 2006). Besides, the debt burden, cost overruns and the inequitable distribution of project costs and benefits are also profound social and economic problems that could partly offset the fruit of the development.
However, efforts to date to counter the ecosystem impacts of Three Gorges Dam have met with limited success, due to a generalized lack of attention to anticipating, avoiding, or the lack of capacity to cope with such adverse impacts. The Three Gorges Dam is a model of authoritarian decision-making with the lack of good governance, failure of transparency and debate, which in turn reflects the environment-neglecting, migrants-marginalizing, and economic-costing processes (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003; McDonald, 2006).