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Foreign Correspondent: The Mekong: A damming example

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View of from boat on Mekong River
Foreign Correspondent: The Mekong: A damming example

SUBJECTS:  Geography

YEARS:  7–8, 9–10


The government of Laos has plans for many revenue-raising dams along the Mekong River.

Find out about a dam, the Nam Theun 2, which was completed in 2010 and lies across the Nam Theun river in the Nakai Plateau.

This clip from the same year asks if the dam could be the flagship for others to be built along the Mekong. Discover also how dams have affected some local indigenous villagers.


Things to think about

  1. 1.How does a country like Australia benefit from having a wealth of natural resources? How do its people benefit? Laos is a developing country that has few natural resources. The Mekong River, however, provides a valuable resource in terms of water. Why might the Lao Government want to use this resource to generate electricity for sale to the nation's neighbours?
  2. 2.Listen for the costs of building the Nam Theun 2 dam and for how the money was raised. What revenue does the government receive per year from the company that runs the hydropower plant? What does environmental scientist Stephen Duthy say about the effects of altering ecosystems? How does he justify the dam's construction? How has the dam's construction affected local villagers?
  3. 3.The indigenous villagers who lived in low-lying floodplains before the dam's construction farmed as a community. Communities such as these often trade crops and resources and are dependent on a productive river and farm lands. Think about the situation of these people. How does the dam construction affect their lives? Have they been able to keep up their sustainable way of life? Why or why not?
  4. 4.Hydroelectricity, solar and wind farms are renewable forms of electricity generation. Why are these forms of energy generation attractive? What issues does each of them have? How would you prefer your electricity to be generated? Why?



Date of broadcast: 5 Oct 2010


Copyright

Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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