What importance do river basins play in the lives of the people living near it.
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Answers
What are the major importances and benefits of river basin development projects?
This is a sticky subject.
River basins often contain fertile soil, and of course, water resources enough to grow a great deal of food and agricultural products. River control projects can also give a lot of protection against floods—which can and have killed literally millions. Good engineering can also optimize what water is there in the event of a drought.
People tend to like to live in green, fertile places, even if they do not work in any agricultural field. This tends to destroy farm land and turn it into housing. Add factories, and unless environmental laws are good and enforced, a lot of pollution may be dumped into the rivers. Ambitious developers just love to build in pretty areas, even if the soils cannot bear the weight of heavy concrete.
But all this development destroys natural habitats that are very important to a lot of wildlife, much of which may be endangered. So, it is a balance.
Ideally, with loads of money and energy and tech, housing ‘should’ be placed away from the best farm and wildlife areas, business centered safely away from both, and leave the people who grow your food alone so they can work! Life rarely works that well.
When we, as humans, came up with the machinery and engineering to divert, contain, and ‘control’ rivers, there was the belief that we knew better than nature. But river basins are built by the physics of water flow, erosion, deposition of sediment, plants, and wildlife. Change one factor, and everything changes. We are still learning how to do this, and many river basin projects made in the last century have created slow-motion disasters.
The Aswan Dam in Egypt has indeed controlled the flow of the Nile river, but cut off the supply of sediment that lent the fertility of Nile farmlands. Without this sediment, and the yearly floods, parasites have multiplied, soils eroded, and the delta is sinking.
When ancient Babylon was great, they took pains to carefully manage their canals and croplands, tailoring their methods to their exact environment. But when foreign invaders took over, and imposed a different management technique, the fertile soils became salted and sterile.
Me, I live in a desert. I just wish I had enough water to experiment with!