Navigating Fish Ladders in Hydropower Projects ( Swat Basin)
Sahibzada Tanzeel Ahmed
International Safeguards Professional ↑Value Generator --Africa/Oceania/Asia
Power generation and irrigation often necessitate the construction of dams/barriers across rivers. However, these structures come with significant environmental, social, and gender costs, particularly when aquatic populations are at risk (red-listed species/ endemic, etc.). Thus the species facing decline requires finding solutions.
In this context, fish ladders emerge as a critical engineering and alternative tool to various non-grey structural arrangements. These niftily designed passageways allow migratory/non-migratory fish to bypass dams, ensuring their survival and maintaining aquatic ecosystems. But beyond their importance lies a complex decision-making process towards its installation. How do we balance hydropower development with sustainability? How can we integrate fish ladders effectively if they are required genuinely? How do we ensure the sustainability of the whole basin when there is a cascade of barriers to fish migration?
There is a strong need for scientific studies across different river basins especially in Pakistan which are already planned for a series of projects in a cascade, along with the use of international good practices, and identifying impacts of dams on aquatic ecosystems and thus assessing fish ladder (Yes or No) as mitigation measure options. Gathering scientific evidence for the identification of locations for breeding, feeding, and movements of aquatic life is an important element in the decision-making process during the project developmental stages (LOI, LOS, and feasibility stages especially for Projects in Pakistan). For hydropower professionals, environmental experts, and hydro investors alike, this article will attempt to offer a hint of exploration of the complex decision-making process surrounding fish ladder installation. This article will illuminate instances where the integration of fish ladders has proven beneficial and where challenges have emerged. This brief readout equips readers with a balanced understanding, facilitating informed decisions promptly that harmonize hydropower development with sustainability.
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Challenges and Opportunities in Hydro Development
This Section explains the complexity of a hydropower project and the challenges during design, construction, and operation.
HPPs are complex projects when it comes to the diversity of risks in terms of social, environmental, land resettlement, Gender, and other cross-cutting themes they pose and these projects have a much longer gestation period as compared to another form of renewables, but in Asia, such renewable energy sources like the hydropower is indigenous with less reliance on other forms of fuel. Besides there are adds such as water supply, irrigation, drought prep, flood control, and tourism it offers a helping hand to wind and solar when they are off the grid.
Hydropower developers can reduce the financial and design changes and delay risks during the Pre-feasibility and feasibility studies when developing the HPP design, and financial estimations. Identification of Critical habitats including species, national parks and other conservation important areas could help the client to develop alternative ways of managing the risks. Project boundaries establishment during the basic design stages and exploring the same for biodiversity threats provide a rare opportunity for the developers to manage the risks promptly. Acquiring permitting and licensing at later stages from various regulators requires policy-oriented changes sometimes thus wasting important time for the Project developers which is happening for most of the HPPs planned on Swat River.
It's always important to understand hydropower design schemes, including site layouts civil works, electrical and mechanical, and grid connectivity. Hydropower schemes are governed by operational modes i.e. Run-of-river schemes, Storage schemes, and Pump storage schemes. This article is limited to experiences with True RoRs or other variety of RoR Projects which depend on weather and seasonal variations and their power generation capacity that varies accordingly but such schemes provide environment and social confidence as a result of its design, such as no peaking and limited storage capacity.
Fish ladders often come into action as a result of either biodiversity sensitivity or social demand from the communities. Ecological flow, which is a combination of water and sediment quantity, timing, and quality, plays an important role in providing an idea about the requirement of fish ladders. Mostly, the Ecological Flows are calculated based on the sensitivities with low, moderate, or high-resolution methods (tools/software) which are impressively detailed in IFC Good Practice on Environmental Flows for Hydropower Projects.
In Pakistan, mostly during the early stages of development, most of the Hydropower Projects (HPPs), especially Run-of-River (RoR) projects, adopt calculating Ecological Flows based on the tenant method, which is a kind of low-resolution method or similar kind of methods. Since these developments in the early stages prefer to look at the rivers with low resolution, they miss an opportunity for early design integration due to its associated budget, technical fatigue, etc. There are other reasons like lack of data and higher cost of explorations during such early stages which discourage the developers from timely and accurately assessing the Ecological Flows based on the sensitivities of the rivers.
Selecting appropriate Ecological Flows acts as a balance for power generation trade-off and aquatic habitat survival. Utilizing appropriate resolution methods like DRIFT DSS allows for better decision-making between different development scenarios such as with fish ladders and without fish ladders.
Most of the HPP projects in KPK, AJK are financed by International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The developers are often inclined to use Good International Industry Practice (GIIP) to manage and offset ecological and social impacts such as of fish migration. However, an anomaly arises when in a cascade, a responsible developer adopts sustainable approaches for aquatic habitat conservation whereas in the same cascade, other developers feel hesitant to adopt GIIPs.
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Cumulative Impact Assessments (CIAs) for these Hydropower Projects (HPPs) should address these issues through proper identification of Valued Environmental Components (VECs) such as those linked with fish ladders (i.e., migratory species, flow regimes, and fish catch). However, due to the lack of policy or legal frameworks at the national or provincial level, there remains a gap for clear-cut instructions.
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If developers are funded by International Financial Institutions (IFIs), then Good Practices on CIAs and Ecological Flows require the developer to come up with a Project-Centric Biodiversity Management Plan with the capacity to offset such residual risks. The issue arises again with the feasibility stages of environmental and social impact assessments lacking sufficient details or studies for decision-making on managing the impacts.
So, what can be done in this regard, especially for Pakistan and the projects in Northern Areas, particularly in a cascade? Environmental or Energy regulators may conduct a basin-wide cumulative impact assessment in a timely manner to identify VECs and ensure the availability of this information to the public. Adaptive management approaches towards the implementation of these measures and effective monitoring of management approaches should be undertaken.
Developers should ensure their designs are flexible and move into due diligence for the sensitivity aspect of this issue in a timely manner by ensuring whether or not there is a species of migratory nature. This way, at later stages, nothing comes as a shock, and cost adjustments for the interventions are done within the project costs.
Practitioners need to extend their knowledge and understanding of the concepts of Ecological Flows, Biodiversity Management, and Cumulative Impact Assessments in terms of Hydropower Projects. Educational institutions should orient students on the cross-cutting issues of Red Listed Species, their conservation measures, and case studies, so once they are part of organizations and part of the systems, they can identify such critical path issues for developers. This would, of course, require the consulting firm to come to the forefront in sharing their knowledge and work through extended knowledge reach programs, especially for universities.
Stakeholder's consultation with communities and the relevant departments is another bridging area that can provide alternate methods and means for offsetting.
#Fishladder #Cumulativeimpactassessment #Eflows
Reference Material for Insights and Knowledge:
https://www.ifc.org/content/dam/ifc/doc/mgrt/ifc-goodpracticehandbook-cumulativeimpactassessment.pdf
Training Material: