It’s a tragic irony. It has been listed as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, yet Bangladesh is rejoicing that it will have a new coal-fired power plant. For it will not only generate much-needed electricity, but also emit the most unwanted greenhouse gases that heat the atmosphere resulting in rising sea levels and floods imperilling many Bangladeshis today. The 1320 MW power plant is a deal signed with India last month, and its construction will begin in July.

Billed at US$ 1.7 billion, it will be built jointly by Dhaka’s Power Development Board and India’s National Thermal Power Corporation. For Bangladesh that needs 6000 MW of power while it gets only three-fourths of that, it will indeed be a big relief when the plant is up and ready in a few years. Then the coal-consuming plant will certainly cut down the country’s load-shedding, while it will ironically add carbon dioxide in the atmosphere spelling disaster for its own consumers. Such plants are built elsewhere in the region as well.

It need not be that way — if only regional cooperation meant anything in South Asia. The abundant water resources in the region make a mockery of dirty energy sources like coal and diesel-fired power plants. As if those already existing were not enough problems, they are adding new ones — in this age of climate change. China builds one coal-fired power plant every week, fine. But as a region that has so much argued to control global temperature rise in the wake of the dangers it faces, can South Asia afford to follow suit?

Indian politicians and climate negotiators, just like their Chinese counterparts, have always maintained that industrialised countries have had their share of development, and that it is now the developing ones’ turn. Nothing wrong with that, except why go for dirty options when you could have cleaner ones? Hundreds of thousands of megawatts of hydropower can be produced from the snow-fed rivers gushing down from the Himalayan belt in the region. Be that in Nepal, Bhutan or even several places in northeast and west India. Some work has happened in Bhutan, but it is limited to export to India.

Nepal offers a classic setup. Here is a country with the potential to generate tens of thousands of megawatts of hydropower, yet it is reeling from crippling load-shedding. If only its immense water resources were to be tapped, clean energy could be plugged into at least four countries in the region — Nepal, India, Bangladesh and, although a bit far away, also Pakistan. All these countries have different levels of power shortages. Given their rapid development and industrialisation, particularly that of India, energy supply will be a major issue.

Reckoning that, the Asian Development Bank years ago came up with a concept of sub-regional cooperation in the area of power supply. Having implemented the idea in Southeast Asia, its expertise would have been perhaps quite helpful in our region. But forget transmitting cross-border power, its project files have been gathering dust. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had launched a programme that it calls South Asia Regional Initiative for Energy in the late 1990s, but the results are yet to be seen.

All these years in the name of regional cooperation, what we have been hearing is lofty talk — SAFTA, SAPTA and what not. The upcoming SAARC summit to be held in Bhutan next month has climate change as its main agenda. Given the regional grouping’s pathetic track record, what will happen in Thimpu is anybody’s guess.

Last year, when South Asian environment ministers met in New Delhi, they were still “reaffirming their commitment to implement the various components of the 1997 Plan of Action on Environment in a timely manner.”  When they met again in Copenhagen two months later, India was stressing allowing a 2-degree rise in the global temperature above the pre-industrial age level while other SAARC countries were pressing for 1.5 degrees.

At the end of the global summit, India ditched the G77 grouping — to which South Asia belongs — and joined hands with the Americans to bring out the controversial Copenhagen accord from outside the UN framework. Regional non-cooperation was fully exposed. In its climate change national action plan it launched in 2008, India had stressed working with other nations in South Asia. It has also stated to the UN climate framework that it aims to reduce the emission intensity of the gross domestic product by 20 to 25 percent from 2005 levels.

Cross-border hydropower supply could so much help it match all its words with actions. That way, it could even begin to replace its old coal and oil-fired power plants by hydro ones, and other South Asian nations would also not have to build new dirty ones. That in turn could earn the region huge carbon credits which it could sell to industrial countries for humongous sums. More clean power plants would also mean less brown clouds in the South Asian sky that has exacerbated regional warming and meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers. The economy and ecology both could be secured at the same time.

Wishful thinking? Certainly, it sits odd with one of the most unstable regions in the world. But if it is to be saved from becoming climatically even more unstable, such moves are crucial. If dirty coal-fired plants can be built bilaterally, there is no reason why clean hydroelectric systems cannot be run multilaterally.

(The author is a BBC journalist based in London)

Navin Singh Khadka

navin.khadka@gmail.com

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