Title
Reducing adverse impacts of Amazon hydropower expansion
Date Issued
2022
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Flecker A.S.
Shi Q.
Almeida R.M.
Angarita H.
Gomes-Selman J.M.
Sethi S.A.
Thomas S.A.
LeRoy Poff N.
Forsberg B.R.
Heilpern S.A.
Hamilton S.K.
Anderson E.P.
Barros N.
Bernal I.C.
Bernstein R.
Cañas C.M.
Dangles O.
Encalada A.C.
Fleischmann A.S.
Goulding M.
Higgins J.
Jézéquel C.
Larson E.I.
McIntyre P.B.
Melack J.M.
Montoya M.
Oberdorff T.
Paiva R.
Perez G.
Rappazzo B.H.
Steinschneider S.
Torres S.
Varese M.
Walter M.T.
Wu X.
Xue Y.
Zapata-Ríos X.E.
Gomes C.P.
Centro Peruano para la Biodiversidad y Conservación
Publisher(s)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Abstract
Proposed hydropower dams at more than 350 sites throughout the Amazon require strategic evaluation of trade-offs between the numerous ecosystem services provided by Earth's largest and most biodiverse river basin. These services are spatially variable, hence collective impacts of newly built dams depend strongly on their configuration. We use multiobjective optimization to identify portfolios of sites that simultaneously minimize impacts on river flow, river connectivity, sediment transport, fish diversity, and greenhouse gas emissions while achieving energy production goals. We find that uncoordinated, dam-by-dam hydropower expansion has resulted in forgone ecosystem service benefits. Minimizing further damage from hydropower development requires considering diverse environmental impacts across the entire basin, as well as cooperation among Amazonian nations. Our findings offer a transferable model for the evaluation of hydropower expansion in transboundary basins.
Start page
753
End page
760
Volume
375
Issue
6582
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ingeniería ambiental y geológica
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85124779691
PubMed ID
Source
Science
ISSN of the container
00368075
Sponsor(s)
This work was carried out by our Amazon Dams Computational Sustainability Working Group based at Cornell University. The contribution of X.W. was completed while at Cornell University. We thank the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability; the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) in Lima, Peru; and Florida International University for hosting working group meetings to develop the project framework. The Amazon Fish Project (www.amazon-fish.com/) provided data for fish diversity threat analyses. We acknowledge the inspirational ideas of our late colleagues Greg Poe and Javier Maldonado-Ocampo, who were instrumental in the conceptualization of this work.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus