norway: too many drops flood the
country
tore
braend, norges naturvfernforbund/foe
norway
Norway’s experiences with hydropower
indicate that even a relatively high degree
of sovereignty and involvement of local
communities in development does not
guarantee the creation of a sustainable
society. Currently, almost 100 percent of
the country’s electricity consumption comes
from hydropower. Due to intensive
industrialization from around 1900 to the
present, Norway’s per capita energy
consumption is among the world’
highest.
Compared with most developing countries,
our hydropower development projects have
been fairly small scale, and local
communities have reaped fairly decent
economic benefits from the projects. Very
few people have been forced to move, as
most dams have been built high in the
mountains. The losses that have incurred to
local people have to a large extent been
compensated.
Yet when the total effect of all of
these individual projects is taken into
account, it is clear that Norway’s natural
environment has paid a very high price. A
large proportion of the habitats dependent
on the natural flow of our lakes and rivers
have been irreversibly impacted. Due to the
lack of comparative research before and
after the development, we simply cannot
tell what species have been eradicated. It
is of course inevitable that humans change
the environment in order to live, but there
is a big difference between securing basic
livelihoods and financing lifestyles of
superabundance, as Norway has done over the
past decades.
Hydro-power developers use the argument
of local sovereignty of communities when
confronted with the environmental movement,
and Norway’s fairly decentralized form of
local government has lent strength to these
arguments. However, the argument that it
doesn’t do a lot of harm to dam one small
river carried more weight around the turn
of the century than it does today, with 63
percent of all economically viable
hydropower in Norway already developed.
FoE Norway believes that one possible
way to ensure the rights of local
communities while protecting the country’s
ecosystems as a whole would be to allow
communities to adopt projects that can be
developed with local resources and
know-how. This would pretty much exclude
oil and gas exploitation, as well as
large-scale wind parks and big hydropower.
However, sensitive environments can still
be damaged by many wind turbines or micro
hydropower plants concentrated in one area.
Thus we feel that there must be some
authority that can take into account the
totality and put limits to the development
of sustainable energy sources in vulnerable
areas.
