The Lower Mekong Dams: A Transboundary Water Crisis

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The governments of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam are planning to build eleven large hydropower dams on the Lower Mekong River. If built, these dams would destroy the river’s rich biodiversity and threaten the food security of millions of people.  

When the dams were first proposed, there was limited understanding of the ways that people depend on the Mekong River and its ecosystems. Now that the threats posed by the Mekong dams have become clearer, tensions have grown between the people who will profit from the dams and those who will bear the impacts. This factsheet provides an overview of the controversy around the proposed Lower Mekong dams.

A River Shared by Millions

 

What’s Inside

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. Starting on the Tibetan Plateau, the river travels through six countries before it forms the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and empties into the South China Sea. Although China has built several dams on the upper part of the river, the lower stretch–shared by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam–continues to flow freely. Over 60 million people depend on the Lower Mekong River for food, income, health, and their cultural identity. Yet the four governments have revived plans to build a series of mega-dams across the river to generate electricity, even though better options exist. Plans for a series of dams on the Lower Mekong River date back to the 1950s, but war and instability in the region made these proposals impossible for several decades. This has now changed. In the 1990s, the Chinese government began to build a cascade of large dams on the Upper Mekong. In the mid-2000s, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Malaysian companies revived plans for eleven large hydropower projects on the Lower Mekong Mainstream. Nine of these proposed dams would be in Laos, and two would be in Cambodia. Most of the electricity would be sold to Thailand and Vietnam. When the dams were first proposed, there was limited understanding of the ways that people depend on the Mekong River and its ecosystems. The dams’ economic, social, and environmental risks were poorly understood. Now that the threats posed by the Mekong dams have become clearer, tensions have grown between the people who will profit from the dams and those who will bear the impacts.

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Download the factsheet in English, Khmer, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese