61 Hydro-Electric Dams Threaten Amazon, Forests

10 Jan

I was surprised and delighted by Jornal Globo’s gutsy report (portuguese) on the 61 hydro electric plants planned from here until 2019, which will destroy 5300 square kilometers of forest– an area approximately four times the size of São Paulo, South America’s largest city. The hydro projects will require 7700 kilometers of transmission wires, and will therefore also require the construction of roads and settlements, a further threat to Brazil’s forests. The proposed hydro projects will generate 42 kilowatts of electricity and most of the dams will be funded by Brazil’s giant development bank, the BNDES.

According to Globo, 15 of the proposed hydro-project will interfere directly with protected areas, and 13 of the projects will interfere directly or indirectly with indigenous reserves. The project is part of the PAC-2, President Dilma’s “Program for Accelerated Growth.” No environmental assessments have been performed. Globo reports that a Federal Defender (from the Ministry of Public Defense– Ministério Público Federal (MPF) from Pará state, Felício Pontes Jr., calls the government’s electric utility, Electrobras, “the government’s biggest black box,” because little public information has been made available on ambitious electricity projects planned or currently underway.

Although Electrobras is 52 percent owned by government, it is a publicly traded company (traded on the Bovespa) and is Latin America’s largest power utility. Indigenous resistance against hydro-projects in Brazil has been ongoing.

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  1. Freedom of Information Bill in Jeopardy as Rousseff Backtracks « Observing Brazil - June 17, 2011

    [...] The reversal represents an apparent effort to maintain the coherence of Rousseff’s majority coalition in the Senate, placating powerful leaders. But President Rousseff’s compromises are also causing internal frictions within her own party. The leader of the President’s Worker’s Party (PT) in the Senate, Humberto Costa, has come out against the President, telling the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, “the PT does not agree with changes to the project, because it is not in favor of eternal secrecy.” Any changes in the Senate would then need to be approved in the Chamber of Deputies before a law could be passed. Rousseff has made calls to set the bill aside for a few months, which suggests the law may not be passed until late 2011 or even 2012, going into operation a year later– almost too late to scrutinize infrastructure projects now underway for the World Cup (2014), the Olympics (2016), and Brazil’s aggressive hydro dam projects. [...]

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