Environmental leader and recently-elected mayor was one of the most outspoken defenders of the River Maranon.
Large hydro-electric power may be cleaner than dirty fossil fuels, but it’s still dirty, as 170 organisations from around the world told governments and financial institutions in a statement released during the UN climate talks in Paris in December. It’s a “false solution to climate change”, they argued, saying it emits “significant amounts of greenhouse gases”, inhibits rivers acting as “global carbon sinks”, makes “water and energy systems more vulnerable to climate change”, and causes “severe and often irreversible damage to critical ecosystems” – to say nothing of the negative impacts on local communities and the 40-80 million people, at least, who have been forcibly displaced to date.
A similar argument is made by the Yagén Defence Front (YDF) in Peru which is fighting the proposed construction of a 600 MW hydro-electric power project, Chadin 2, which would dam the River Maranon and flood 32.5 square kilometres, numerous villages, and extensive croplands and valleys high in biodiversity. “They told us [Chadin 2] will bring clean energy,” a 2013 YDF statement read, but “it will generate large quantities of methane that contributes enormously to global warming. . . [I]t will destroy almost all the varieties of fish in our river and it will force us out of our lands and displace us into places we don’t know. No project that destroys the natural world and causes social problems can be said to generate clean energy. It is a lie.”