After 10 years of operation, the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant in Pará state has yet to resolve its most severe local impact: the reduction in water flow in the Volta Grande do Xingu. The 130-kilometer (81-mile) bend on the river in the Brazilian Amazon is rich in biodiversity and vital to Indigenous peoples and riverine communities. Belo Monte is the largest hydropower plant in the Amazon and the second-largest in Brazil. Since construction plans began, local and Indigenous communities have been warning that the plant could disrupt the Xingu ecosystem and livelihoods. Ensuring sufficient river flow was a nonnegotiable condition of the project’s environmental licensing, but Belo Monte’s operator has invoked Brazil’s energy security to avoid reviewing the volume of water diverted from the Xingu River. Technical reports by the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, alongside independent monitoring by researchers, have confirmed early warnings and pointed to grave and irreparable impacts across the Volta Grande (Big Bend) as Belo Monte began operating in 2016. Subnormal water levels have dried flooded forests and ironstone formations, disrupting reproduction and causing physical deformities and massive mortality among fish and turtle species, many of which are endemic to the region and critically endangered. “The Xingu is a highly unique river,” Lúcia Rapp Py-Daniel, a biologist and researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research, told Mongabay by phone. “Several species of fauna and flora have adapted to the rapids flowing over an almost continuous bed of rock that exists only there. We are seeing a…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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