The Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range, may soon hold another record: it could become home to the greatest density of dams in the world. More than a thousand are either already operating, under construction or being planned in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan. Besides providing clean energy, they could improve flood control and access to drinking water. But they will also pose a serious threat to indigenous species.

Hydroelectricity supplies , but even so nearly 300 million of the country’s inhabitants have no access to electricity. More dams could help plug the energy shortfall: India’s hydropower potential is estimated to be four times its current production of 39 gigawatts.

at the University of Delhi, India, and R Edward Grumbine at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming, have now studied the impact 292 of the planned Himalayan dams will have. They used satellite imagery and published data on Himalayan species richness to estimate how each dam’s location would affect forest cover and biodiversity.

Extinctions loom

“We project that about 1700 square kilometres of forests would be submerged or damaged by dams and related activities”, says Pandit. He and Grumbine predict that such deforestation will result in the likely extinction of 22 flowering plants and 7 vertebrate species by 2025. This number would rise to 1505 flowering plants and 274 vertebrates by 2100 if construction work continues.

Another recent study suggests the dams will be bad news for many of the Himalayas’ 300 species of fish. Jay Bhatt and colleagues at the University of Delhi studied distribution of fish species in 16 Himalayan rivers, and found that those richest in biodiversity, with the greatest number of endemic species, were also those where dams will be concentrated.

“Dozens of dam projects are already caught up in litigation due to faulty environmental impact assessments, displacement of people, inadequate compensation, destruction of traditional water and livelihood sources, and loss of biodiversity,” says Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the , an informal group of organisations and individuals interested in the impact of dam-building. The combined effect of several hundred new dams would be gargantuan, he adds.

Journal references: Pandit and Grumbine study: , doi.org/j3z; Bhatt study: PLoS One, doi.org/j3x

Farmer’s groups are greeting with jubilation. “This is like the fall of the Berlin Wall for Indian agriculture,” Sharad Joshi, founder of the Maharashtra-based farmer’s organisation Shetkari Sanghatana, told żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”. “Farmers have been deprived of new technology for a long time but now they will have access to it.”

But environmentalists have condemned the move. “It’s a recipe for environmental and social disaster,” says Devinder Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security. “This will open the floodgates to genetically modified organisms.”

Bt cotton contains a gene from the common soil bacterium Bacillus thuringensis that codes for a protein that kills pests such as the bollworm. The bollworm has devastated cotton crops in states such as the Punjab for the past four years.

Proponents of the technology say Bt cotton will help farmers cut down on expensive pesticides. Poisonings among farmers are common, and pesticides also contaminate groundwater. In 2001, farmers in Gujarat and Andhra states planted 11,000 hectares of land with Bt cotton without government approval or knowledge (żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”, 10 November 2001, p 19).

Mustard, soya and corn

Official trials of Bt cotton have been going on in India for four years. “The field trials clearly established that Bt cotton grows in a healthy way in our conditions, and insects are killed by the toxin. There were no adverse effects on soil flora,” says Achyut Madhav Gokhale, chair of the environment ministry’s Genetic Engineering Approval Committee.

Trials of transgenic mustard have already started. “We expect soya, corn and others to follow later,” Gokhale says. “It’s a technology we cannot stop.”

He adds that only conditional clearance has been given to the Maharashtra Hybrid Company which is part-owned by Monsanto, holder of the patent on Bt cotton. Farmers will have to fulfil norms such as planting 80 per cent Bt cotton and 20 per traditional cotton to provide “refuges” to stop pests developing resistance to the Bt toxin. For the moment, the company will monitor the transgenic crops.

“How is this going to work in a landholding of less than half an acre where a small farmer is supposed to waste 20 per pent of the crop?” asks Suman Sahai, president of Gene Campaign in Delhi. She says the conditions are ludicrous for Indian farming conditions and the trials scientifically flawed and not transparent.

Occasionally vaccinations are recorded more than once, says Anthony Burton of the vaccines division of the WHO in Geneva. “If your data are over-reported, you may not be paying attention to a problem area and kids who normally would have got vaccinated will get a disease and die,” he says.

Burton and his colleagues at WHO and UNICEF analysed vaccination data for the past 20 years. “We discovered that 25 per cent of data were simply missing and 19 per cent were ‘outliers’,” Burton says. Outliers have “something funny about them”, such as unusual jumps or inconsistencies.

For example, they found that 106 per cent of children in Bangladesh were given the third dose of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine (DTP3) in one year. In Sierra Leone, take-up supposedly jumped from 28 per cent to 68 per cent between 1997 and 1998, despite a civil war.

And the problem is not limited to developing countries. Curiously, the review found that there was no data from Norway.

Coverage “myth”

“National level immunisation coverage values are a myth,” says virologist T. Jacob John, advisor to the Indian state of Kerala. He says that for “year after year”, India reported vaccinating hundreds of thousands more children against polio than the number of doses the country purchased.

What is more, independent experts say this has been going on since the 1970s. “Everybody knows about it,” says Pierre Claquin, an epidemiologist working in Bangladesh.

There the reported figure for measles immunisation in 1999 was 96 per cent, as compared with 61 per cent from an independent survey, he says. “Too often in the past health workers were threatened by punishment if they did not meet targets.”

The WHO and UNICEF are now preparing revised estimates after re-analysing and comparing the data with independent surveys. “As of now, we are reserving the right to disagree with the country submitting the data,” Burton says.

Until recently, almost half a million female olive ridleys, Lepidochelys
olivacea, came to Gahirmatha beach between December and May virtually every
year to lay 50 million eggs. But for the second year in succession, no more than
about 50 turtles have turned up at the beach to nest. In addition, some 13 000
dead turtles have been washed up on the coasts of Orissa since December.

“The second consecutive miss is a very serious cause of concern,” says turtle
expert Bivash Pandav of the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehra Dun.

Environmentalists say the blame lies almost entirely with the trawlers. The
nets that they use, which are up to 2 kilometres long and 30 metres deep, stop
the females reaching their nesting beaches, and most turtles that become
entangled drown.

The UN’s Global Environmental Facility is funding a project to encourage
fishermen to use turtle excluder devices, which filter out any turtles that swim
into the nets. In May, the Orissa High Court ordered trawlers fishing off the
Bhitarkanika wildlife sanctuary to use the devices, but local environmentalists
say that not one has complied.

As such, Cameroon is an ideal candidate for environmental aid from the West.
In 1995, developed nations agreed to invest $17 million over four years
in a project to manage and improve its biodiversity. The scheme is run by the
Global Environment Facility (GEF), a fund set up in 1991 by the United Nations
and the World Bank to channel money from the West to help solve environmental
problems in the developing world.

But three years on, according to a damning internal assessment, the Cameroon
project has comprehensively failed. An unpublished review carried out last year
by the GEF concludes that it is poorly conceived, badly managed and plagued by
“incessant bickering and resentment over administrative failures”.

The project is also a victim of poor science. It is supposed to protect six
different ecological areas in Cameroon, but there is no consistency in the
conservation methods used in the different areas, the review says. Worse,
because few data on species and their distribution were collected at the start,
there is no way to judge its progress. What information there is on the status
of wildlife is “often inaccurate and/or out of date”.

As an example of how environmental aid has failed, the Cameroon project is
far from unique. Two major evaluations of the GEF published earlier this year,
one by insiders and one by outside consultants, conclude that its biodiversity
projects have fundamental flaws. Even the agencies that run them—the World
Bank, the UN Environment Programme and the UN Development Programme—rate
12 per cent of them as “unsatisfactory”.

Out of focus

At the Earth Summit in Rio six years ago, the GEF was welcomed by developing
countries and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) as an innovative means of
redistributing wealth to preserve ecological health. It was adopted as the main
source of funding for the UN conventions on biological diversity and climate
change. Since then, with $1.6 billion donated by 34 countries, it has
approved 230 projects throughout Asia, the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin
America and the Caribbean. Conserving biodiversity is only one of its aims. It
is also charged with combating climate change, protecting international waters
and phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals.

Many of the complaints about the GEF come from those it is designed to help.
Developing countries say that it mainly addresses environmental problems of
concern to the West while ignoring the most crucial issues affecting the Third
World. Anil Agarwal, director of the Centre of Science and Environment in New
Delhi, says the fund could do better if it listened to the right people. “The
GEF is focusing mainly on government institutions and underemphasising the role
of small NGOs and community groups.”

Desertification, for example, affects nearly 30 per cent of the world’s
land— 1 million hectares in Africa and 1.4 million hectares in
Asia—and costs countries $42 billion every year. Yet this problem
receives only marginal support. It is only eligible for GEF funding if it
affects one of the four agreed areas. “It is time the GEF seriously considered
the issue of land degradation,” says Mostafa Tolba, the former head of the UN
Environment Programme.

Of the projects the GEF does fund, those concerning biodiversity have drawn
the most criticism. A review compiled by the GEF secretariat in Washington DC
says this is because they are overambitious, exclude local communities and
operate in a scientific vacuum. The underlying reasons for the loss of
biodiversity are “often poorly understood”, the review says.

A second report, written by 25 independent environmental consultants, is
equally critical. It concludes that the fund “had not been able to focus on
ecosystems of greatest global importance to the extent that would be
»ć±đČőŸ±°ùČčČú±ô±đ”.

Gareth Porter, an American consultant from Washington DC and the report’s
lead author, points out that there has been no scientific attempt to prioritise
which ecosystems and species should be targeted. Some scientists argue that
priority should be given to ecosystems with the greatest diversity of species,
such as rainforests and coral reefs. Others think species confined to particular
regions, such as rhinos, or especially vulnerable ecosystems such as mountains
and coastlines, ought to top the list.

In the absence of any agreed scientific criteria, the GEF secretariat has
decided that any site that has been designated by an international organisation
as a nature conservation area is of potential “global importance”. But as Porter
points out, this is not a very discriminating technique. Just three of the
designations used to determine grant eligibility—World Heritage Sites,
Ramsar wetlands and Biosphere reserves—cover more than 1000 sites.

Money for nothing

In practice, 60 per cent of the funds have been directed towards the 25
countries with the greatest biodiversity in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Porter, however, says that national governments have sometimes directed money to
areas of less than global importance within those countries. Grants have also
been given to countries with no globally important sites at all, he claims, like
the $2.5 million awarded to Lebanon in 1996.

As in most UN agencies, decisions about the allocation of GEF funds are
complicated by national rivalries. Porter points out that many of the 32
countries on the GEF’s ruling council resist any scientific attempt to rank
different ecosystems because they fear it will limit their choices. This is
unlikely to change, he says. “They don’t want scientists telling them what is
globally important.”

Pier Vellinga, a Dutch environmental scientist who chairs GEF’s Scientific
and Technical Advisory Panel, agrees that a more systematic analysis of
biodiversity priorities is required. But he urges sympathy for GEF’s plight.
“GEF is a unique experimental organisation that brings difficult issues to the
table,” he says.

One of the most vexed issues is funding. At the first GEF assembly in New
Delhi in April, governments pledged $2.75 billion over the next four
years. Although this is nearly twice that spent over the past six years, it is
dismissed by developing countries and NGOs as “chewing gum”. They argue that
$125 billion is really needed.

But one GEF failure disappoints environmental groups more than all others. An
explicit aim of establishing the fund was to force the organisations involved to
take environmental sustainability to heart. In particular, it was hoped that the
World Bank would think twice before investing in development projects that
damage environments the GEF is supposed to protect.

This has not happened. Between 1993 and 1997, the bank invested $9.4
billion in fossil fuel projects that will accelerate climate change, and less
than $300 million on schemes to prevent it. Across the globe, say
environmentalists, the World Bank has backed dams, roads and chemical-intensive
agricultural projects that threaten to wreck protected ecosystems.

In Cameroon it is proposing to fund a 1000-kilometre oil pipeline across the
country to Chad. Korinna Horta of the Environmental Defense Fund, an American
pressure group, says this will damage the very rainforests the GEF-sponsored
project is trying to save. The GEF, she concludes, is no more than “Band-Aid for
a battered planet”.