Concern over K-Water's ethics in water scheme

The construction will be led by Korea Water Resources Cooperation (K-Water), but the network said it believed the constractor, which is facing heavy opposition from local people, did not have the experience to operate a mega-project of this complexity.
Moreover, K-Water has now come under the scrutiny of the South Korean National Audit and Prosecution agency after it was discovered that the dams it built in four rivers had been done without any assessment of the local communities and had also damaged natural resources.
“We found that K-Water caused problems in four major river basins in South Korea and flouted the law in such areas as national finance; environmental impact evaluation; and the effects on local heritage and the river,” said Hyung Cheol Yum, Korean general manager of the Federation for Environmental Movements.
He was speaking at the seminar entitled “Lesson Learned for Water Management among Environmental Networks from Korea and Thailand”, organised by Thai Society of Environmental Journalists (TSEJ).
Yum said on Monday that he had visited a site in the North where a flood-retention area would be constructed.
The construction this project will be done by K-Water, which won two water-management projects valued at Bt160 billion, including the construction of a flood-diversion channel.
He said K-Water had being trying to expand its portfolio to include overseas projects in the energy business, including large water-works projects. However, he said, the company had been accused on of manipulating data and implementing practices that had not been properly assessed.
“This has resulted in environmental damage and social conflict in local communities, as in the case of Shiwa Lake, the Hantan River dam and the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project,” he said.
Yum said the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project had a severe environmental impact on the surrounding region, in particular the plague of green algae it brought to the river in the summer and the deaths of many species of fish due to pollution.
Meanwhile, the South Korean National Audit office said K-Water only had experience in constructing and operating the Gyungin flood canal, which is only 18-kilometres long.
This project had been strongly opposed by the local community and more than 70 per cent of South Korean people were not happy that K-Water was in charge of the construction, Yum said.
He said Thai civic groups and state agencies should set up a tri-party committee to monitor the construction work done by K-Water to ensure that it had no detrimental impacts on the regional environment and on the lives of local communities.