Critically evaluate the costs and benefits associated with the Tucurui Dam Project in Brazil - Do you feel that this scheme was justified?

Authors Avatar

                                        Assignment 2: Water                                  November 2003

Critically evaluate the costs and benefits associated with the Tucurui Dam Project in Brazil.

Do you feel that this scheme was justified?

 With 45 000 large dams throughout the world, it is clear that dams have made a crucial assistance to human development, and the advantages derived from them have been significant. Similar to all development options, assessments on dams and their alternatives must consider a vast range of requirements, expectations, aims and confinements. Dams have both costs and benefits, making these costs and benefits balance is a exceedingly delicate task.  In several cases an inappropriate and often unnecessary cost has been made to achieve those benefits, particularly in social and environmental terms; the Tucurui Dam in Brazil being one of these cases.

The Tucuruí Dam is situated on the lower Tocantins River within the Tocantins-Araguaia River Basin adjacent to the Amazon basin in north-eastern Brazil. The complex was constructed with the chief objective of producing hydropower, with the secondary goal of supplying a navigable river route being introduced later. The complete cost of Tucuruí was US $7.5 billion, this total exhibiting a 77% cost overrun. The people of Pará State perceived an association between hydropower and shipping as a chance to stimulate the local economy.  One must note that fundamentally, the social and political receptivity to the Tucuruí hydropower complex at the regional level rested on the prospect of linking the two sectors.  However, the locals are yet to see this prospect in action. The construction of the locks was hobbled by a shortage of funding, and ground to a halt in 1989, the remaining parts for the lock system were said to be completed

Join now!

with Phase II of the project.  Yet uncertainty loiters over Phase II construction schedule, with relation to the building of the locks. Additionally, although the communities around the area of the complex anticipated that the project would stimulate the development of the region, shockingly they did not receive electricity from the project until 1997, when, only as a consequence of intense pressure from local groups, a step-down substation was constructed to cater for the locals.

    Conversely, on a wider scale hydropower now accounts for 90% of the total power consumption in Brazil with Greenhouse Gas emissions lower ...

This is a preview of the whole essay