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The Environmental Impacts of Large Dams Land and water are ecologically linked in a natural system called a watershed. From the smallest droplet to the mightiest river, water works to shape the land, taking with it sediment and dissolved materials that drain to w ....

Middle of Essay
.... than Zimbabwe, and 13 times the size of Lesotho. Volta Reservoir behind Ghana's Akasombo Dam, flooded 4% of that nation's land area. In the United States, whose 5,500 large dams make it the second most dammed country in the world, we have stopped building large dams, and are now spending great amounts of money trying to fix the problems created by existing dams. Although the impacts of large dams have been well documented for some time now, in case after case, new ones are proposed whose environmental impacts are downplayed or even ignored. A suvey showed that most dams were built without the consideration of downstream effects, even when t ....