The FT reports:

China's Three Gorges dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe if the government does not act quickly, senior Chinese officials have warned in an unusual public nod to the massive project’s ecological impact.

The comments, carried in state media on Wednesday, mark a rare Chinese admission that dire predictions of ecological destruction from international experts and domestic opponents of the world's largest dam are coming true.

Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam are creating environmental and safety hazards that cannot be ignored, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the State Council Three Gorges Construction Committee, was quoted as saying. “We cannot exchange environmental destruction for short-term economic gain,” he said.

After 15 years of construction the controversial project has affected a 600km stretch of the country's largest river, with local officials complaining of increased landslides and a profusion of algal blooms along the length of the reservoir.

The flow of the Yangtze above the dam has been reduced from 2 metres per second to 0.2 m/s, causing the sediment in the river's famously muddy water to settle on the riverbed.

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fef84bc-6c16-11dc-a0cf-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=9c33700c-4c86-11da-89df-0000779e2340.html