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In recent years scholars have advanced our understanding of the biophysical, socioeconomic, and geopolitical impacts of dams and hydropower infrastructure around the globe. Databases and maps have emerged that allow global comparisons between countries and river basins. However, reliable and freely available data do not exist for many regions. As a result, data limitations and quality issues persist, which limit the quality of analyses based on these datasets. This is particularly true in regions where hydropower infrastructure development is proceeding most rapidly, including South Asia's Third Pole region. We identify and describe serious quantitative and qualitative data dilemmas of existing databases. We divide these into location, size, type, and status. At the most basic level, these dilemmas mean that incorrect location and, more importantly, massive underrepresentation of existing and future projects generates incorrect conclusions. That underrepresentation results largely from uncritically equating absence of data with absence of infrastructure. We also argue that project function should be more reliably recorded (for both dams and hydropower projects), that project status should be clear (many existing projects are still passed off as future), and that smaller projects should be systematically recorded (their cumulative importance is often underestimated). These four dilemmas all have important implications for analyses based on existing datasets. The World Index of Hydropower, Dams, and Reservoirs (WIHDR) described here represents a major advance on all four points. For the first time, 652 existing hydropower plants (277 large and 375 small), 162 under construction, and 720 planned hydropower plants have been georeferenced and systematically recorded for the Indus‐Ganga‐Brahmaputra region. This article is categorized under:Science of Water > Water and Environmental ChangeWater and Life > Stresses and Pressures on EcosystemsScience of Water > Methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southwest China's Yunnan province is evolving into one of the world's largest hydro-power-producing regions. It already rivals the world's largest hydro-producing nations. However, five of Yunnan's six basins are international and therefore its hydropower development is of great academic and geopolitical interest. While the implementation of large projects on Yunnan's three large rivers (Jinsha, Mekong and Nu) is relatively well studied, hydropower development outside these three main streams is hardly known. Here, we identified 128 large hydropower projects ( ≥50 MW) having a capacity of 16.5 GW, along with another 16.4 GW of other types of power generation, neither of which has been discussed in the academic literature yet. The paper utilizes a powershed approach to study the rapid hydropower development underway in Yunnan, both in its implication and challenges (at basin and administrative level) as well as in its trade-offs within the broader electricity context. Yunnan's power generation and consumption patterns are characterized by diverging interests of local/provincial usage and export utilization. Within the province, the largest (hydro-) power users are energy/electricity intensive industries, which themselves have strong impacts on land use changes. Yunnan is also evolving as a major power exporter, already in 2013 exporting about one-third of its generated electricity mainly to Guangdong's Pearl River Delta. We see a need for a critical revision of those existing generation and consumption paradigms, which includes a rethinking of major development modes, both in terms of future hydropower generation and utilization projects as well as export obligations [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid hydropower development is occurring in China's Yunnan province in response to increasing clean energy demands, exposing potential vulnerabilities of the area's ecosystems, communities, and geopolitical systems. Here, we present original data on the cultures, economics, hydro-politics, and environments of the Nu River basin, based on household surveys, analysis of geopolitical events, and hydrological, hydraulic, and landscape modeling. We identify sources of vulnerability and investigate relationships among biophysical, socioeconomic, and geopolitical elements that contribute to vulnerability. Our results illustrate the role of geographic isolation in intensifying vulnerability to hydropower development and how access to information, data uncertainty, and geopolitics influence the vulnerability of people and the environment. We emphasize specific needs for developing support mechanisms for social, ecological, and political groups that are vulnerable to hydropower development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]