By Peter Kallang, Founder of SAVE Rivers
This month marks ten years since the Sarawak government formally shelved plans for the Baram Dam, a massive hydropower project that would have flooded 412 square kilometres of native customary lands and displaced some 20,000 people from 30 villages in the Baram River basin.
It was a hard-won victory for Baram’s Indigenous communities, who led one of the longest-running blockades in the state’s history to prevent its construction. For more than two years, villagers from across the Baram region held the line against preparatory logging roads and survey teams, asserting their rights to their lands and protecting the Baram River. When the project was officially cancelled in March 2016, it was celebrated as a major triumph for grassroots resistance in Sarawak — and it seemed to mark a turning point for Indigenous rights and environmental protection.
Yet a decade later, the lessons of Baram appear to have been forgotten.
Just last month, the Sarawak government announced a request for proposals for the construction of five new cascading dams across the state, in the Tutoh, Belaga, Danum, Balui and Gaat watersheds. In its ambition to become a major “clean and green” energy exporter, Sarawak aims to begin exporting hydroelectric power to Singapore by 2032, once an undersea transmission cable is completed.
Sarawak also plans to generate 15 gigawatts of electricity by 2035 — roughly twice the entire power demand of Singapore. Much of this expansion is justified by the vision of the ASEAN Power Grid, a long-discussed plan to link electricity networks across Southeast Asia. Yet the grid remains only partially realised, and the assumption that neighbouring countries will need large volumes of imported hydropower is far from certain. Across the region, governments are rapidly increasing their own domestic generation capacity, raising the possibility that Sarawak could end up building dams to supply a market that never fully develops.
Supporters often portray cascading dams as a more environmentally friendly alternative to mega-projects like Bakun, Murum, or the proposed Baram Dam. But they are anything but clean or green. While cascading dams may not flood landscapes on the same scale as large embankment or gravity dams, they create a different set of ecological disruptions. Instead of one barrier, they fragment entire river systems with a chain of dams that block fish migration, alter sediment flows, and degrade downstream ecosystems.
A dam, after all, is still a dam — a fundamental disruption to the natural flow of a river system. Fish and wildlife populations that rely on the steady movement of clean water are harmed, while communities that depend on rivers for food security, drinking water, micro-hydro systems, and transportation face declining fish stocks, sedimented water, and the loss of safe and reliable river travel routes. A growing body of research has also shown that dams are not climate-neutral: methane is released both from water passing through turbines and from organic material decomposing in the sediments that accumulate in reservoirs.
Beyond their environmental risks, the new cascading dam plans raise serious questions about whether such projects are even necessary. Sarawak already possesses massive hydropower capacity from dams such as Bakun and Murum and has frequently produced more electricity than it can use. The justification for building multiple additional dams relies heavily on uncertain future demand from energy-intensive industries and speculative export markets.
In this context, Sarawak’s renewed dam push appears less like a necessary energy transition and more like a continuation of the same dam-driven development model that sparked resistance in Baram a decade ago.
Experts have also warned that cascading dams may not deliver the reliable power they promise. Building multiple dams along a single river can increase costs while producing inconsistent electricity, particularly in regions like Sarawak where river levels fall sharply during prolonged dry seasons. Former industry leaders have cautioned that cascading systems may struggle to generate power when water levels drop, making them an expensive gamble for a region already prone to drought.
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Energy at Johns Hopkins University Daniel Kammen, a Member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and Coordinating Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned in 2019: “Arguments to build large dams are actually an effort to steal from current and future Malaysians… . There’s no need to continue accepting tragic trade-offs between healthy rivers and ecosystem-destroying mega-dams. Today reliable renewable electricity from solar and wind are the cheaper, more modular, scaleable, and more job-creating options.”
Communities displaced by the Bakun Dam continue to suffer from the impacts of forced resettlement. More than two decades after being relocated to the settlement of Sungai Asap, when their traditional forests, farms, and longhouses were flooded, community representatives are still fighting to receive the land and financial compensation they were promised. Ironically, despite living near one of Southeast Asia’s largest hydropower dams, electricity supply in the settlement remains weak and unreliable, and residents regularly experience blackouts.
Sarawak’s current cascading dam plans rest on the same problematic foundation as the Baram Dam: development of Indigenous lands without the full involvement, consent, and respect of the communities who will be most affected.
The protests that stopped the Baram Dam were the result of years of organising by Indigenous Kenyah, Kayan and Penan communities who refused to accept the destruction of their ancestral lands. While the state’s new cascading dam plans have conspicuously avoided the Baram itself, communities elsewhere are beginning to organise in a similar way.
Along the Tutoh River, near Gunung Mulu National Park, Kayan, Penan, Tering and Berawan communities have launched petitions, held community meetings and staged public protests demanding transparency and consultation over the proposed dam on their native customary lands. A coalition of civil society organisations has also called for Indigenous voices to be included in any future planning process.
Ten years ago, the cancellation of the Baram Dam offered a rare opportunity for Sarawak to rethink its development model — to prioritise Indigenous rights, ecological stewardship and development without destruction.
Now, as the state prepares to establish a new generation of dams that will alter its rivers while offering no discernible benefits to local Sarawakians, the question is unavoidable: Has Sarawak learned nothing from Baram? March 14, the International Day of Action for Rivers is a vital reminder that our rivers are the lifeblood we cannot lose.