A Huge Coal Plant Could Soon Be Built Near A Fragile Mangrove Forest, And Citizens Are Protesting

[yuiyoshida]

The Sundarbans, as the world’s largest mangrove forest, is home to more than 300 species of plants, 200 species of fish, 315 species of birds and 49 species of mammals. And soon, the World Heritage site will sit just over eight miles south from two huge coal plants — planned developments that many worry will damage the air and water quality of the forest and destroy the livelihoods of the thousands in Bangladesh and India.

If environmental and human rights protesters have anything to do with it, however, that won’t happen. Last week, hundreds of activists marched more than 150 miles from the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka to the southwestern Bagerhat District, a four-day protest that ended over the weekend. The protesters called on the government to halt plans for the 1,320-megawatt Rampal coal plant and the 565-megawatt Orion coal plant, both planned for Bangladesh. The larger Rampal plant, which would take up more than 1,800 acres of land, is scheduled to go online in 2021.

The protesters were also calling on the government to conduct an independent Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of the coal plants, said Sharif Jamil, coordinator of Waterkeepers Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi government did conduct an EIA on the Rampal power plant, but it used the Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services, a government-run agency, to do so. Since the Rampal plant is a joint project of India’s state-owned National Thermal Power Corporation and Bangladesh’s Power Development Board, getting a government agency to conduct the EIA “raises questions on the objectivity of the report,” a study on the coal plants by South Asians for Human Rights states.

“We hope the governments will understand the importance of the Sundarbans and will cancel the permits, and we demand [the] government to ensure independent investigation by the EIA before any such plant be declared,” Jamil said.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/03/16/3760217/sundarbans-coal-plant-protest/