2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference
March 13 - 15, 2022
5/24/2018 | 12:00 PM - 12:15 PM | WHAT ARE THE COSTS OF DAMMING THE AMAZON? | 430 B
WHAT ARE THE COSTS OF DAMMING THE AMAZON?
The prospect of building hundreds of new dams in the Amazon Basin presents a complex challenge for avoiding significant environmental and ecological degradation the world’s largest tropical river basin. The alteration of fundamental fluvial processes will disrupt riverine habitat structure and dynamics that are critical to sustaining ecological processes that support ecosystem productivity upon which indigenous and local peoples depend. Impacts spanning local (at-a-dam) to regional (basin-wide) scales will have a spatial distribution that reflects the size, location and operation of proposed dams in large tributary systems to the Amazon River main stem. The total environmental footprint of proposed dams (including greenhouse gas production) is not known, and there is an urgent need to comprehensively and transparently characterize the tradeoffs associated with hydropower energy production versus water and food security afforded by free-flowing Amazonian rivers. The presentations from this special session illustrate state-of-the art understanding about environmental risks of development of the Amazon’s hydropower potential. However, they also reveal knowledge gaps that require a coordinated, interdisciplinary and international scientific research program to assess risk to social-ecological sustainability posed by hydropower development in the Amazon Basin.
- Dams
- Hydropower
- Hydrology
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Presenters/Authors
N LeRoy Poff
(), Colorado State University, poff@lamar.colostate.edu;
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
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Nonfinancial -