Wrong climate for damming rivers
International Rivers has created a state-of-the-art Google Earth 3-D tour and video narrated by Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth International and winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award. The production was launched at COP17 in Durban. The tour illustrates how melting glaciers in the Himalayas may lead to higher flood and safety risks for communities living downstream of dams. The tour plunges the viewer deep inside one of Brazil's dirtiest reservoirs, at the Tucuruí Dam, to visualize how rotting organic material creates methane gas, which bubbles up from dam reservoirs to emit greenhouse gases in the tropics. The tour visualizes what smaller, decentralized projects would look like that could more efficiently eradicate energy poverty in Africa than large dams, while also reducing the economic risks of drought-crippled dams.