Latest update February 21st, 2025 12:47 PM
Oct 12, 2010 News
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) yesterday called on the government to suspend what it said was the “short-sighted investment” in the Hope/Dochfour Canal until a flood mitigation strategy has been developed within the framework of a national environmental consultation.
The Ministry of Agriculture responded by saying that the claims of the Association are unsubstantiated. The Hope/Dochfour Canal is being constructed at a cost of $3.6 billion.
The Association said that the work should be stopped until the technical feasibility and social benefit of the Hope/Dochfour Canal is established as the best option to pursue, and a financial and social accountability mechanism is in place to ensure transparency in implementation of whatever scheme is adopted.
The GHRA chided the government for ignoring technical advice that the construction of a high-level dam from the East Demerara Water Conservancy to the sea-wall in the vicinity of Hope/Dochfour is ill-advised.
“Why the Government persists with a project which presents formidable technical problems; is immensely expensive and is not considered the best solution to the problem it is intended to resolve, remains a mystery,” the GHRA stated yesterday.
But the Ministry of Agriculture has said that it did not ignore technical advice. Following the 2005 flood, the Ministry had said that technical work done by a battery of local and overseas engineers recommended that the East Demerara Water Conservancy, in addition to its existing relief, must be supplemented by being drained through other means, if catastrophic flooding was to be averted.
Later, the Ministry said a UK firm in collaboration with two local firms won this contract and proposed two engineering solutions, namely a high level northern relief, starting at Hope/Dochfour and ending at the Atlantic and a Flagstaff-Mahaica Canal.
But the GHRA argued that farmers in the Mahaica and Mahaicony areas will derive relief from the proposed Hope/Dochfour canal is not necessarily true, nor adequate justification for not looking at the more obvious technical solutions (most of which involve the Western, not the Eastern end of the conservancy).
Further, the Association charged that reacting to the 2005/08 floods as if they were a one-off, abnormal occurrence is global warming denial.
The basic lesson emerging from the 2005 flood, reinforced by the 2008 floods, namely that rising sea-levels and global warming pose daunting threats to the future of the coastlands called for a comprehensive review of the major coastal drainage schemes, the GHRA posited.
The Association said that the World Bank made financing available for precisely such a wide-ranging study and that review would have provided insights into the feasibility, the scope and scale as well as the cost and time-table of creating a viable environment for human habitation on the East Coast.
Alternatively, of course, it may also have encouraged the conclusion that the East Coast has no long-term viability and that migration inland is the only feasible future, the GHRA pointed out.
”Thus the recklessness in rushing into the Hope/Dochfour is not only dubious for the reasons noted above, it also postpones – at least in the short-term – a vital but politically inconvenient debate about climate change in Guyana,” the Association declared.
The GHRA posited that the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) has eclipsed all other environmental debates.
“As a preventative strategy the LCDS has much merit, but environmental action stands on two legs, conservation and mitigation. Mitigation with respect to coastal flooding is an immediate and present danger which is growing at a faster pace and, in purely national terms, is of greater urgency than the LCDS,” the body insisted.
The GHRA agreed that Guyana’s responsibility to conserve its forests for global benefits should be acknowledged and supported by all Guyanese, but argued that on purely environmental grounds, the national priority must be mitigation of flooding, otherwise, whatever financial benefits and developmental gains are gleaned from conserving forests will likely be absorbed by emergency responses to ever more devastating flooding.
Now that the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF) has been established, an important priority claim on it is a major national consultation on the future of coastal Guyana, backed by the technical studies which would allow people at all levels to make informed decisions, the GHRA said.
It added that such a consultation should be ring-fenced against political propagandising of the kind which tainted the REDD+ consultations. A consultation of this nature should be genuinely national rather than partisan since by the nature of the issue there are no priority ‘stake-holders’, the future of everyone in Guyana is at stake, the Association said.
The Ministry of Agriculture said that the Conservancy Adaptation Project is on-going but has a more limited set of objectives than those proposed by Guyana Human Rights Association.
“This project is aimed at aiding Guyana to adapt to climate change and focuses on a key facility, the East Demerara Water Conservancy. The US$3.8M World Bank Conservancy Adaptation Project will finance the development of the technical foundation which will strengthen the master plan of interventions within the EDWC and lowland drainage systems, as well as specific upgrading works and operational improvements aimed at enhancing the flood control capacity of the EDWC,” the Ministry stated.
”These works are expected to improve the ability of the government to manage water levels behind the EDWC during heavy rainfall by improving internal flows in the EDWC. Additional upgrading of water control structures have been undertaken including the rehabilitation of the Lama No. 1 and No. 2 Sluices, restoring of the Kofi outlet and in a limited way the re-opening of the Cunia outlet into the Demerara River,” the Ministry added.
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