Anyone who saw the recent social media backlash against Nestle knows that water access is becoming a global flash point. And that’s especially true in Central Asia, a region singled out by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence as having an “inadequate” ability to provide stability and mitigate political grievances over water. Here, international water rights hang between economic, political and environmental disaster. In Tajikistan, the upland source of the Amu Darya River, efforts to harness the flow of water to liberate the region from dependence on fossil fuels – as well as regular energy blackouts – have challenged an unsustainable status quo. Tajikistan wants to resume work on a dam on the Vakhsh River that would increase manyfold its electricity generation capacity and light up villages all the way to Pakistan, several hundred miles away. Originally chartered in the Soviet era and then delayed by civil war, flooding, stop-and-go funding and international gridlock, the Rogun Dam project is a necessity which has long been denied to the Tajik people.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 08:13:42 +0000
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