The construction of any major infrastructure inevitably has an impact on the area in which it is located. What is important to understand is whether this impact can be considered sustainable from an environmental and social point of view or whether, on the other hand, the negative effects are so great as to make the project harmful and incompatible with the needs of the area. Infrastructures such as dams are particularly illustrative of this as, on the one hand, they are designed to produce renewable energy with emissions approaching zero, while, on the other, if they are built in ecologically and socially fragile contexts, they have an absolutely destructive impact, often in opposition to the interests of the populations that should benefit from the energy produced. An environmental and social impact assessment and a consultation process with local populations should be two fundamental prerequisites for defining the feasibility and characteristics of the infrastructure. These two elements were deliberately left out in the case of the GIBE III dam, whose main characteristics were analysed in a previous article, and whose impact was only observed in the last few years after it began operating in 2016.
Even before the construction of Gibe III, several local and international organisations had conducted independent studies predicting that the dam would have a severely damaging impact on the surrounding ecosystem of the Omo Valley and Lake Turkana. These studies inevitably contrasted with the environmental and social impact assessments carried out by the government and the companies involved, which were judged to be insufficiently thorough and unable to capture the full extent of the infrastructure’s effects. Five years after the commissioning of Gibe III, reality has shown that the complaints made by the local population and numerous NGOs were not exaggerations, and the dam’s negative impact on the ecosystem and its inhabitants is indeed in line with what had been predicted.
The environmental impact of the GIBE III dam
From an environmental point of view, the primary effect is a greater concentration of water upstream, before the dam, and an inevitable reduction downstream along the course of the Omo River and especially in Lake Turkana where it flows. Given that Lake Turkana receives 90% of its water from the Omo River, the filling of the Gibe III reservoir and the consequent reduction in water led between 2015 and 2017 to a lowering of the lake by one and a half metres, and it is estimated that the lake could shrink by as much as 10-20 metres from its average depth of 30. The reduction in water level brings with it other effects including: an increase in salinity, with a consequent reduction in transported nutrients and a decline in the fish population by two-thirds; an increase in sedimentation and risk of erosion; an end to seasonal river flooding; and a general increase in drought throughout the affected area.
Before proceeding to analyse in detail the extent of this change in the ecosystem, it is important to say a few words about the context in which it took place. The Horn of Africa is one of the areas in the world most affected by climate change, with Lake Turkana seeing a rise in temperature of around 2-3 degrees Celsius over the last 50 years. During this period, the lake has receded dramatically, also due to the various dams that have been built: whereas before it was partly in Ethiopia, today it is only within the borders of Kenya. Droughts have gone from occurring about every four years to annually, and with them the rainy season has been drastically reduced both in terms of the number of times they occur in a year and their duration.
The addition of a dam of the magnitude of GIBE III exacerbated the already existing drought problems, resulting in a reduction in agricultural and pastoral activities, with inevitable over-exploitation of the land and fishing. The interruption of the natural cycle of flooding of the Omo River, caused directly by the dams, was the final blow for an ecosystem that was at the end of its rope and for the populations that lived in harmony with it.
Finally, the construction of the dam has been accompanied by the development of large-scale irrigation systems that have affected about 100,000 hectares around the Omo basin, transformed into intensive sugar cane plantations and 50,000 hectares into cotton plantations. In order to do so, since 2011, thousands of hectares of savannah previously inhabited by indigenous peoples have been expropriated and destroyed, with the aim of creating a real hub for agro-industrial exports.
Direct social impact
The disruption of the environmental context, coupled with the government’s industrialisation policies, has inevitably led to changes in the social composition and negative effects on the inhabitants concerned. For the sake of analytical simplicity, the social impact of Gibe III can be divided into two types, the direct one, caused mainly by changes in the ecosystem, and the indirect one, caused by the intensification of the former.
As we have seen in the previous article, the area surrounding the Omo river valley and Lake Turkana is densely populated by indigenous groups strongly linked to agricultural and pastoral activities for their subsistence and based on a delicate balance in relations between different peoples. We are talking about at least 400,000 people (100,000 in Ethiopia and 300,000 around Lake Turkana) directly affected by the effects caused by the construction of the dam. In particular, along the Omo on the Ethiopian side are the Mursi, Bodi, Kwegu, Kara, Nyangatom and Dassanach while on the Kenyan side are the Turkana, Elmolo, Gabbra, Rendille and Samburu.
Since the filling of the dam’s basin began and natural flooding stopped, food security for these populations has been severely jeopardised. Farmers used to cultivate after the annual floods, and in the same way these floods allowed livestock to graze and initiated fish migrations. The failure of these floods has automatically led to chronic famine and major health problems. Problems with agriculture and livestock farming have led several peoples to change their habits by increasing, or beginning in an unprecedented way, to feed themselves through fishing. An increase in the use of fish resources, combined with an already ongoing reduction in fauna, has led to a drastic decrease in fish.
The migrations and changes in habits and social composition brought about by changes in the ecosystem are compounded by the transformations imposed by the industrialisation process in the area. Expropriation and forced removal of land are part of the government’s “villagization” policy, which pushes people to migrate from more rural areas to cities or towns with a higher concentration of population, adopted to free up the areas surrounding the river in order to build intensive plantations granted to large multinational companies. According to a report by the think tank Oakland Institute, these operations took place in a climate of violence, with forced displacement, beatings and rape in total violation of the most basic human rights. One of the objectives of the villagization was to provide services to the people affected by the construction of the dam, services that were never implemented as promised, further worsening their condition.
Indirect Social Impact
The environmental and social changes outlined above have in turn triggered further social upheavals, especially in the relationships between different peoples. In particular, the scarcity of natural resources, such as fish, has given rise to new conflicts over them, with occasional government interventions that are inadequate to pacify the situation. Conflicts exacerbated by the new possibility of easy access to firearms. Fish shortages, changes in grazing areas, the search for new cultivable areas, small-scale migrations, and increased cattle raids have led to a conflict that is producing hundreds of deaths in total media silence. According to a UN official, the clash between the Dassanech and the Turkana is ‘one of the first conflicts in the world due to climate change’.
Other indirect effects are the dependence on humanitarian aid, the inevitable disintegration of the social fabric, and the loss of a wealth of knowledge and traditions deeply rooted in the way of life of the peoples affected. Lastly, there has also been a negative impact on education, since the difficulty of accessing natural resources has been followed by a greater need for labour to work the little land left, a burden that has mostly fallen on the youngest girls.
Failed or unrealised mitigation projects
Although the environmental and social impact assessments were inadequate for the type of effects actually produced by the construction of Gibe III, some containment and mitigation measures had already been envisaged. However, these proved to be inadequate in relation to the scale of the changes produced.
The biggest impact was the lack of natural flooding of the Omo River, with cascading environmental and social effects. To address this problem, the project proposed the creation of artificially regulated floods scheduled to last about ten days. This was an inadequate plan from the outset because the Omo’s natural floods usually lasted for months and because artificial floods would not be adequate to reach all the affected areas with the necessary intensity. Thus agricultural productivity was not guaranteed at all.
With respect to economic livelihoods, the industrialisation plan for the Omo Valley and the subsequent inauguration of the Omo-Kuraz III factory in 2018 had envisaged as many as 700,000 jobs in the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation. The promise was not kept as only 4% of the jobs would actually be created and many of these would be given to migrants who arrived from other parts of the country on seasonal and underpaid contracts.
Finally, among the promises made to the people forced into villagisation processes was the possibility of easier access to services such as roads and drinking water. Again, promises were not followed up by deeds, as witnessed by some members of the Dassanech people who report that according to the agreements, every village should have had a pump to irrigate their fields and that only 2 villages out of 52 received it.
An outlawed dam
The main violation of local and international regulations lies in the lack of consultation with local populations prior to the start of construction. In fact, according to the World Bank’s World Commission on Dams, the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples and Ethiopia’s national legislation, it was necessary to obtain the full and informed consent of the local population before the construction of the infrastructure, especially given the significant impact it would have on changing their living conditions. In 2010, the Commission reportedly issued a report stating that these conditions had not been met.
In 2009, the NGO International Survival published a report on Gibe III, ‘According to the Consultation and Public Disclosure Programme, only 93 members of four different indigenous communities were contacted. The consultations took place in 2007, after the work had already begun. […]. Few members of these communities [affected communities in general] speak Amharic, Ethiopia’s national language, and even fewer speak English, the language in which the ESIA documents were written. In Kenya, consultation with affected populations has never taken place.”
In addition to the violation of national and international laws on consultation and consent of indigenous peoples, and the various human rights violations committed during the construction of the dam and the forced villagisation procedures, the construction of Gibe III also violated World Bank rules on transparency and competition, as the contract was awarded to Salini directly without a regular tender.
Furthermore, about 30 kilometres from Lake Turkana lies the archaeological site of Nataruk, where excavations carried out between 2012 and 2016 have brought to light artefacts that are up to 10,000 years old. In response to these discoveries, in 2011 the World Heritage Committee urgently called on the Ethiopian government to immediately stop construction work in order to protect the surrounding heritage. Today, Lake Turkana is on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in Danger.
Conclusion
Gibe III demonstrates that the sustainability of infrastructures aimed at fostering forms of economic and social development is not only determined by technical aspects, such as the type of energy resource (in this case water). Hydroelectric plants are undoubtedly among the cleanest and most efficient forms of energy production currently available, but this does not alter the fact that the use of such technologies, within an economic and political system that is far removed from the needs of the territories and the population, can produce devastating effects similar to those of much more climatically polluting plants.
In this context, the total imbalance of power between local populations and large multinational companies should be balanced by the presence of public actors capable of governing this type of process. In the absence of strong state actors, or in the presence of corrupt political classes, this role should be fulfilled by international multilateral actors able to protect the rights of the weakest and avoid or mitigate the construction of such devastating infrastructures. However, this mechanism rarely takes place and the economic and political interests of the few too often end up crushing the rights of the many as in the case of Gibe III. The devastation that the Omo Valley and Lake Turkana have experienced may not stop here, as two more dams are planned to be built in the next few years, and if all goes as planned the risk is that of a new ‘Lake Aral’ with an almost total drying up of Lake Turkana.
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