What was a negative impact on the environment from the Three Gorges Dam?

Environmental impacts Downstream erosion caused by irregular water flow also led to bursting river banks and flooding. In addition to landslides and floods, the dam sits atop two major fault lines causing hundreds of tremors. In 2011, Chinese authorities admitted the concerning scale of environmental side effects.



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The most important effect that the construction of the Three Gorges Dam has had on Chinese society has been the displacement of millions of people from the Yangtze river region. In order to establish the reservoir, hundreds (possible thousands) of towns and villages were evacuated and later submerged.

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Chinese officials staged a sudden about-face, acknowledging for the first time that the massive hydroelectric dam, sandwiched between breathtaking cliffs on the Yangtze River in central China, may be triggering landslides, altering entire ecosystems and causing other serious environmental problems—and, by extension, ...

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On one hand, the benefits of the Three Gorges Dam are flood control, power generation, navigation, aquaculture, tourism, ecological protection, environmental purification, development-oriented resettlement, transfer of water from southern China to northern China, and water supply and irrigation.

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While the construction of the Three Gorges Dam was an engineering feat, it has also been fraught with controversy: construction of the dam caused the displacement of at least 1.3 million people and the destruction of natural features and countless rare architectural and archaeological sites.

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Over 1,300 cultural and archeological sites and 100,000 hectares of agricultural land have been submerged by the reservoir, while also impacting the habitats of over 6,000 plant species, 500 terrestrial vertebrates and 400 species of fish along the Yangtze River.

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And for about 4 million people, the dam project was mostly a disaster, as it flooded 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages.

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