Dam problems - Rivers at risk

Which rivers are at risk?

Rivers are the backbone of human society, but freshwater ecosystems have suffered a lot from an increasing population and the associated development pressures.

According to the 2004 WWF Living Planet Report freshwater species populations plummeted by a spectacular 50% between 1970 and 2000 - the most rapid decline of WWF's three priority biomes, forest, freshwater and marine.

Globally there are few rivers that are unaffected by dam building, and many river basins are at risk from further dam development. Rivers at Risk (PDF: 3.70 MB), a new WWF study, found the Yangtze basin in China to be the most at risk from dam development with 46 dams planned or already under construction.

Other dam building hotspots are the La Plata basin in South America, which comprises the Paraná, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers, and the Tigris-Euphrates basin in the Middle East.

The effects on freshwater ecosystems can be devastating. For example, river dolphins and porpoises are among the most threatened mammals in the world and the 6 basins where these species live, the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Amazon, are all included among the top 'at risk' basins in this Rivers at Risk analysis.