Dams: an ecological impact assessment

Abstract

Dams are a strategy to meet the demand of a growing world population, supplying our cities with water and energy, and they even serve to regulate disasters such as violent floods. Even so, its construction has a strong environmental impact with obvious immediate effects, and others that remain underlying and manifest themselves in the long term, posing a serious threat. These problems caused by dams are present around the world, and Catalonia is no exception. To give an example, the construction of dams usually involves the destruction of floodplains, which generates ecosystem destabilization that triggers an ecological disaster. Despite this, the prognosis is not as catastrophic as it seems. Currently we can take measures and implement strategies to minimize the negative effects of dams, and in this article we review the most important ones.