Mega-canals could slice through continents for giant ships
Third Party Content: Newscientist
11 April 2017
The Panama Canal may soon have a giant neighbour across Nicaragua – and two huge waterways could be built in Asia. Will they help or hurt the environment?
Plainpicture/Sabine Vielmo
AFTER years of protest, the world’s biggest civil engineering project yet is now cleared for takeoff. Late last month, the Supreme Court in Nicaragua turned down the last environmental claim delaying the construction of the $50 billion Interoceanic Grand Canal.
It will carve a 273-kilometre channel through the small Central American country to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean – even though the Panama Canal, 1000 kilometres to the south, already does the job, and received a massive upgrade less than a year ago.
Why the duplication? Proponents of the canal say it will ease congestion that the upgrade can’t address, and create new economic opportunities for Nicaragua. By shortening journeys, it could even help stem the rise in the shipping industry’s share of global carbon emissions, which could reach 17 per cent by mid-century.
But the project also raises troubling questions about the environmental chaos that could ensue when alien species navigate between newly linked oceans. This matters even more given that Nicaragua’s mega-canal isn’t the only one in the works. On the other side of the world, backers of two others have been watching progress closely. One of them will make the Nicaragua project look downright petite.
The natural world can’t keep pace with our escalating demand for far-flung goods. An increasing proportion of the world’s freight in everything from cotton and crude oil to computers and Christmas toys edges through just two artificial waterways: the Panama Canal and, across the world, the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea.
But canals are choke points that are vulnerable to disruption by any number of causes, including administrative screw-ups, natural disasters and the age-old threat of piracy.
It is getting harder to keep maritime traffic flowing smoothly, despite our best efforts. Last June, the Panama Canal saw a $5 billion overhaul completed; in 2015, the Suez Canal was augmented by a second shipping lane cut through Egypt’s Sinai desert, at a cost of $8 billion.
And yet such infrastructure upgrades may not be enough. Gargantuan new ships that can carry over 20,000 containers have quickly made them look out of date. In January, the Panama Canal had to reduce the number of parking berths for super vessels, warning of “unusual delays”.
Little wonder the Nicaragua canal was an easy sell for some.
In 2013, President Daniel Ortega signed a deal with Chinese investor Wang Jing and his company, HKND Group, licensing them to build a canal across the country and giving them a 50-year concession on its operation. Wang’s canal, three times as long and twice as wide as the Panama Canal, would provide a new option for ships plying between China and the US east coast.
Unsurprisingly protests ensued, delaying construction. The project has enraged Nicaraguan ecologists. Its most outspoken critic is Jorge Huete-Perez at the University of Central America in Managua, a former president of the country’s Academy of Sciences. Huete-Perez told New Scientistthe canal would cut through biosphere reserves and destroy 4000 square kilometres of rainforests and wetlands. He also warned it would decimate coastal coral, mangroves and beaches where sea turtles lay their eggs – as well as inundating the villages of several indigenous forest tribes. “The canal project represents the worst nightmare for Nicaraguan conservationists,” he says.
Fears are perhaps greatest for Lake Nicaragua. Spanning almost half the width of the country, it is the nation’s chief source of fresh water. More than 100 kilometres of it lies on the canal’s route, requiring a trench three times the lake’s existing depth to be built. That will “irreversibly alter the aquatic environment of Nicaragua,” says Axel Meyer of the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Not every scientist is against the idea. Freshwater biologist Jeffrey McCrary, who is based in Nicaragua, says peasant farmers have already destroyed most of the country’s pristine rainforest. Rather than removing what remains, the canal could trigger economic activity that would give them alternative jobs. HKND’s chief project adviser Bill Wild, a construction industry veteran, agrees. “Personally, I believe that the canal is the only thing that will save the Nicaraguan environment.”
The project has had a positive environmental assessment, produced for HKND by a UK consultancy. But last November, Nicaragua’s Academy of Sciences dismissed it as “propagandistic” and having “no scientific foundation”.
Nonetheless, environmental objections have now been sidelined. Ortega, newly re-elected and keen to get going, has increased his attacks on opponents of the canal, snuffing out protests. Construction could start before the end of the year.
While the Nicaraguan canal promises to vastly expand the Central American shipping corridor, a further two mega-canals are being negotiated. They would offer alternatives to two other major sea routes, namely the Bosporus – Russia’s sole southerly maritime access to the outside world – and the narrow Straits of Malacca, the gateway to China. Their advocates have watched the Nicaragua protests with interest, and their mood may well have been lifted by developments there.
Bypassing the Straits of Malacca would mean cutting a 50-kilometre notch through a finger of land called the Kra isthmus, in the south of Thailand (see map). This would give China, the region’s superpower, the option for its ships to avoid the congested straits, shortening a route used at present by a third of all international cargo shipping. Container ships sailing between Shanghai and Mumbai, for example, would be able to shave more than two days off an 11-day journey.
The environmental impact of the project has not been studied but could be considerable, says Ruth Banomyong of the Thammasat University in Bangkok. However, as in Nicaragua, political will is unlikely to bow to environmental concerns. With an estimated cost of $20 billion, the Thai canal will be the cheapest of the proposed mega-canals, as well as the simplest to build. Another plus is that it would fulfil a promise made in 2013 by Chinese premier Xi Jinping to create a “maritime silk road”.
Both the Thai and Nicaraguan canals are dwarfed by a project being plotted to connect the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf. Its route would cleave right across Iran, stretching some 1400 kilometres. But length is hardly the biggest challenge. It would also need to traverse mountains up to 1600 metres high, requiring more than 50 giant locks, says Peyman Moazzen, a marine engineer based in Singapore, who has studied the scheme.
But the geopolitical prize might be worth the effort. Such a link would give Russia a long-desired sea route to east Asia that avoids the circuitous journey via essentially Western-controlled seaways like the Bosporus and the Suez Canal. Any environmental concerns would probably be trumped by the fact that Iranians think one of the proposed routes could double as an irrigation canal, watering the desert sands of eastern Iran.
The fates of both the Thai and the Iranian canals may well be determined by what happens in Nicaragua. A major protest will take place in Managua on 22 April, but legal avenues have been shut. The only remaining barriers are raising the money and any faltering in political will.
There may be one last, slim hope for opponents of the canals: an altogether different way for ships to get between oceans. Engineers in South Korea say it might be easier, and more environmentally friendly, to span the relatively flat Kra isthmus with a railway sturdy enough to carry ships weighing up to 100,000 tonnes (not much smaller than the Panama Canal now takes). The Korea Railroad Research Institute, which has pioneered the idea of these so-called “dry canals”, suggested earlier last year that it could be built for a quarter of the cost of the Thai canal. A similar project has been proposed in Honduras, just north of Nicaragua.
Is this the start of a new spate of monumental projects that archaeologists will be studying 10,000 years from now? It all depends on how fast we want our stuff.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Carving up continents”
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