Bakun Dam - Environmental and Social Damage

Environmental and Social Damage

The Bakun dam flooding commenced on 13 October 2010 with a faulty startand will put 700 km² of land under water - equivalent to the size of Singapore. The rainforest of this part of Southeast Asia has some of the highest rates of plant and animal endemism, species found there and nowhere else on Earth, and this dam has done irreparable ecological damage to that region.

Construction of the dam required the relocation of more than 9,000 native residents (mainly Kayan/Kenyah) of the indigenous peoples who lived in the area to be flooded. Many Sarawak natives have been relocated to a longhouse settlement named Sungai Asap in Bakun. Most of them were subsistence farmers. Each family were promised 3 acres of land but many families still have not been compensated.

Concerns were raised also about such things as the relocation of people; amount of virgin tropical rainforest which had to be cut down (230 km²); possible dam collapse issues; increase in diseases with water-borne vectors such as schistosomiasis, opisthorchiasis, malaria, and filariasis; and sediment accumulation shortening the useful lifespan of the dam. A 5 part series of Bakun dam documentaries was filmed by Chou Z Lam. The series highlighted the basic community problems faced by displaced indigenous people such as the lack of land areas for farming and hunting, lack of educational, medical, and transport facilities and also the promises not being kept by the government. This documentary series was later banned from Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) on May 2010, forcing the remaining series to YouTube.

Transparency International includes Bakun Dam in its ‘Monuments of corruption’ Global Corruption Report 2005. The mandate to develop the project went to a timber contractor and friend of Sarawak’s governor. The provincial government of Sarawak is still looking for customers to consume the power to be generated by the project.

Launched in February 2012, an international NGO coalition that includes organizations from the US, Norway and Switzerland are showing its solidarity with Malaysian groups who are protesting against the construction of twelve hydroelectric dams in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo. The NGO coalition supports the Malaysian groups' demand for an immediate halt to the realization of these dams, which threaten to displace tens of thousands of Sarawak natives and flood hundreds of square miles of Sarawak's precious tropical rainforests.