Updated Hydropower Dam Database for the Mekong
This data set is populated, curated and managed by the Mekong Region Futures Institute. The datasets list all known (and unknown) dams in Cambodia, China (Yunnan), Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam, and provide the following additional information (where available): The name of the project; any alternative names, the country in which it is located, the river on which it is located, the dam's location (decimal degrees, latitude/longitude), the dam's function (hydropower, irrigation etc.), its status (commissioned, under construction, etc.), year of commissioning, installed capacity (if appropriate), average annual electricity production (if appropriate), the irrigation area it is intended to serve (if appropriate), the dam's height, its crest length, its total storage (at Full Supply Level), its maximum reservoir area (at Full Supply Level), the number of people the dam has or will displace, the estimated cost of developing the dam, the destination of its power supply (if appropriate), the financiers of the dam, its developers, and its owners, and, finally, the concession period (if appropriate).
Photo ©Green News Agency, Thailand
The primary focus of this initiative has been to identify every hydropower or multiple use dam of 15 MW installed capacity or above; and/or every irrigation or water supply dam with a reservoir area of 0.5 km2 or above in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Chinese Province of Yunnan.
This dataset builds on the work carried out by the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems - Greater Mekong focussing on the dams of the Irrawaddy, the Mekong, the Red, and the Salween River Basins.
Dam Locations: location of existing/under construction dams have been identified via Google Earth Pro. Insofar as planned dams are concerned, a variety of sources have been utilised including published maps, news reports describing their location, websites providing its locations, and other freely available datasets. For each dam identified in the set, data provenance is described in the notes (Column AF) in each of the spreadsheets. Other data have been detected in research publications, reports, websites, new reports, and more.
Basin designations: for each dam identified, the river sub-basin and major basin has been identified. Catchment boundaries and names are derived from the Food and Agriculture Organization's 'Map of Major River Basins and Sub-basins in South East Asia', http://www.fao.org/nr/water/espim/spatial/index3.stm
These data are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial–NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The data may be freely quoted and reproduced provided the source is acknowledged. If reproduced in whole or in part, no part of the information or nomenclature used in the datasets may changed or altered without the written permission of the copyright holders. The data may not be used in whole or in part for resale or other commercial purposes.
MERFI [insert year of download], Dataset on the Dams of the Greater Mekong. Bangkok, Mekong Region Futures Institute.
