09/12/2021
Atrato is the third largest river in Colombia. It extends throughout the department of Chocó, from its birth in Cerro Plateado, in the municipality of El Carmen de Atrato, to its mouth in the Caribbean Sea, in the Urabá region. This river stands out for its ecological, identity and biocultural importance for the black, indigenous and peasant communities that transit its basin and live with it.
Projects in the pipeline
Since 2012, the national government has been considering the idea of using the flow of the Atrato River energetically, especially in its upper basin, close to its source. Specifically, there has been talk of a project of several electric microcentrals known as Talasa.
This dates back to September 2014, when the Colombian company Universal Stream S.A.S. advanced administrative procedures for the establishment of four power plants in the upper and lower Atrato basins. Universal ended up transferring the project to the company Talasa ProjectCo S.A.S. – E.S.P. in 2016, which again undertook the procedures for three of the four microcentrals initially planned.
In addition, since August 2019 a project named La Puria Hydroelectric Power Plant and another named Rio Grande have been promoted to be built on the Rio Grande, a tributary of the Atrato also in El Carmen, by the company Hydrofirst Inc. Colombia S.A.S.
Microcentrals as green energy?
These three projects share a modality of hydroelectric generation plants known as “edge of water”, being classified as “small hydroelectric plants” (PCHs). In public scenarios, these projects have been presented as green energy sources, since they affirm that, by exploiting a renewable source of energy and not requiring the damming of water and flooding of land in large areas, high impacts would not be generated, as other large hydroelectric projects we have seen in Colombia, such as El Quimbo and Hidroituango. This, however, is debatable.
Regardless of the scale of the projects, the construction and operation of hydroelectric power plants has extensive effects on the lifestyles of the communities that inhabit the dammed rivers, as well as on their ecological dynamics, their flows and waterbeds. Even more serious, Colombia does not have strict national standards for classifying the size of dams. The Energy and Gas Regulation Commission (CREG) and the Energy Mining Planning Unit (UPME) have different classification models according to the generation capacity of each plant. This lack of standardization has allowed hydroelectric plants (with a potential of 20 MW or higher) to be presented as small plants or as projects with a lower environmental impact. Such has been the case of two of the three projects that make up Talasa: each project estimates a capacity of 19.9, 71 and 80 Megawatts.
The situation regarding these standards is worrying. In the same environmental studies presented by the company, it is recognized that two of the three plants will require damming and flooding areas to ensure the operation of the plants. Information that has not been openly communicated to communities in territory.
Hydroelectric installation but people without light
The project is promoted as a strategy to guarantee access to energy in one of the regions lagging behind in the matter in the country, as is Chocó. It is estimated that the generation capacity of these projects exceeds more than four times the energy consumed by the department. However, there is no guarantee that this service will reach this population.
On the contrary, the energy market system in Colombia has decoupled the stages of generation, transport, and distribution of energy, without any correlation between producer locations and consumers. In this sense, the energy to be produced is designed to go towards the National Interconnected System in the direction of Antioquia, and from there to the rest of the country and even to the outside. The logic of the energy market in Colombia is designed not to guarantee access to the service for the bulk of the population, but to pursue competitive advantages to supply large private consumers that guarantee greater profitability.
Where would the rights granted to the Atrato River lie?
Although the use of water for energy generation is a broad topic of debate, the Atrato case deserves a special analysis, for having been declared as a subject of rights by the Constitutional Court through Decree T-622 of 2016.
By virtue of this decision, the Atrato River was granted broad and comprehensive rights to protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration. This recognition of rights is part of a broad movement that advocates for the rights of nature and, specifically, those of rivers. With 18 cases, the rise of the rights of nature has consolidated Colombia as a world leader in the matter.
In this area, there is talk of the rights of rivers to flow freely, to perform essential functions in their ecosystems, to feed and be fed by sustainable aquifers, to native biodiversity, to be free of pollution, and to restoration. All these rights are related to those recognized to the Atrato, so the construction and operation of hydroelectric plants on this, would contradict its guarantee and realization, and its survival as an ecological and community fabric around which local life is articulated.
It is worth remembering that so far, the Atrato is one of the last large rivers that flow free of damming in Colombia. It would be questionable, that after the State granted rights to the river to guarantee its living conditions, at the same time stimulated projects that affect its ecosystem dynamics.
The impacts would also be social
The establishment of hydroelectric plants not only affects the rights of the Atrato River but also those of the human communities that inhabit it: indigenous, black and peasant. In the case of the first two, the territory has been recognized as a fundamental right, based on the interdependence between the survival of ethnic peoples, their cultural identity and ancestral territory. Peasant communities also have differential rights to land, water, the environment and political and environmental participation. The right to the collective titling of the territory grants the autonomy for its free administration, without there being an inconsult intervention on the same.
The effects caused by the construction and operation of one or more hydroelectric plants for the exploitation of the flow of the Atrato River, would disturb in the medium and long term the integrity of its bio-community fabric1. The ways and projects of life of the cultural and biological diversity that characterizes the basin are threatened by these hydroelectric projects, which generate limitations on the conditions for movement, affect the quality of water and coastal ecosystems, affect the traditional economies of local communities, among many other impacts. Impacts that have been extensively documented in Colombia2 and the world3.
Under this scenario, and the insufficient information from local authorities on environmental matters, the progress of hydroelectric projects in the Atrato River threatens the realization of the river’s rights, as well as the rights of the Atratine communities. It should not be necessary to remember that the Chocoan communities have historically lagged behind and have been disproportionately affected by war and the absence of a State with a social focus.
Given this scenario, it would be important to promote an open dialogue to evaluate the relevance of these projects, which, as our country’s history shows, have resulted in the benefits of “development” do not reach the local communities and it is they who assume the negative impacts, costs, and direct and collateral damages of the implementation of these projects.
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