The Three Gorges Dam: Was it Worth the Cost?

In geography, we have started to learn about water and about rivers.The Three Gorges Dam is the first case study that we are doing. It is located in Yang Tze River, China. This river is a river that cuts through China and is one of the many rivers that China has. This river goes through many mountainous regions and flows through its chasms. The 3 Gorges Dam is currently the worlds largest dam costing a hefty 22.5 billion USD. Spanning 2.3km, 185 meters tall, holds back 20 billion tons of water and thus generates a massive 85 kilowatt-hour a year. The 3 main goals that the dam had was to generate electricity, control flooding and also to be able to carry large ships deeper into the river for better trade. For this, we have looked at this dams impacts through the scope of social, environmental and economic perspectives to see if it really was worth it.

Firstly is the social impacts it had. In most ways, the 3 gorges dam has had mostly negative effects.This idea was originally planned out because it allowed for the generation of electricity and it could control floods. The Yangtze River would occasionally flood and damage many homes and villages. The one main social benefit was that the 3 Gorges dam created a lot of electricity, providing for about 10% of China’s electricity needs. But after the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam, it had actually submerged about 100 towns, displacing 1.3 million people and covering lots of fertile lands and that could have been used for agriculture. This forced people to move into the city even if they didn’t want to. The city of Chong Qing’s population increased to 30 million, and because the cities population exploded many people found it hard to get jobs etc. However, this wasn’t all, the dam created other strong environmental impacts, increasing the danger of landslides. For the people who lived on the side of the mountains, walls started to crack and caused many of its residents to feel uneasy.

The environmental impacts on Yang Tze River were very significant as well. It is a sustainable clean resource for producing energy and saves a 100 million tons of C02, which is equivalent to about 50 million tons of coal being burnt. But this isn’t all, it reduced flooding from 1 in 10 years to 1 in 100 years. However, of course, it wasn’t all positive. Because of the dam, 682 km2 was submerged, the water couldn’t flow out to the ocean as smoothly before, this degraded the water quality as water pollution increased as well as silt. This had negative impacts on the river’s ecosystem, threatening species such as Yang Tze river dolphin, Chinese sturgeon, and the finless porpoise.  But still Created more jobs because they had to hire people to clean the river of the trash that would collect. The water levels of the water in the reservoir also increased it kind of made the beauty of the landscape reduce as it was less jaw-dropping. Also because of its yearly fluctuations, the land started to become more saturated, increasing landslides and putting more people at risk.

Finally the economic impacts. The economic advantages were that it created new jobs for people, trade was allowed further inland with the deeper river which increased the economic growth of inland China and had a kind of economic boom. But with these improvements, there were still other negatives. For example, there was a decrease in tourism because of the less pretty landscape. Because so many people were millions of people that were displaced, they had to build many homes for people and the rebuilding of the homes was also delayed by quite a lot because of the increase in natural disasters and slow boat. But probably the most noticeable thing about this bridge is its almost insane price tag of 22.5 billion dollars.

In the end think that the dam wasn’t really worth it, even though yes at the time it seemed like a good idea. Its current negative effects out weigh almost all of its positives.