The water held back for the dam props up a different way of life thousands of miles away, generating energy for some 60 million people.
Belo Monte’s operating license is now up for renewal; a decision from IBAMA, the federal environment agency that greenlighted the project, has been pending since the first license expired in November 2022. This regulatory limbo has offered a rare opportunity for river communities to try to tweak the rules that govern how much water powers the dam and how much is left for ecosystems and people.
Extreme drought, linked with both climate change and deforestation, has further raised the stakes by threatening river health and reducing power generation — a reality faced by many hydroelectric plants around the world. But Lula’s government is now in the spotlight: He will host this year’s U.N. climate conference (COP30) in Brazil while facing scrutiny from environmental and human rights advocates over his campaign promises on sustainability. Belo Monte’s relicensing looms as a test of how his government handles difficult trade-offs between energy security, environmental protection, and Indigenous rights.
To build the Belo Monte complex, engineers diverted much of the Xingu’s flow to power turbines through an artificial canal, flooding just under 50,000 acres of land and displacing an estimated 40,000 people. The project also severely lowered river levels along an 80-mile stretch downstream.
Giliarde Juruna, chief of Muratu village in the Volta Grande. Anita Makri
Feet from the shoreline in this part of the river, Sara Rodrigues, a fisherwoman who has lived all her life in the Volta Grande, watches quietly as a group of visitors huddle over a hand-drawn graph meant to show why local fish stocks are in peril. Suddenly her voice bursts in, tinged with frustration. “The water comes, carries the eggs, takes them away, destroys tracajá’s [turtle’s] nests and breeding grounds,” she says, cutting to the chase.
Encoded in the curves of the graph was a key message: The problem isn’t just the volume of water lost to the dam, but the disturbed rhythm of its flow — naturally high during the Amazonian winter and low in the summer. Fish need a surge of water to travel upstream and into spawning sites on forested islands, or igapós. Fruit ripens and falls just at the right time to feed them. If river levels drop at the wrong time, fish eggs dry out in shallow waters and fruit that drops on dry ground goes to waste. If waters rise out of season, turtle eggs, buried on the sandy shores, get washed away.
Ebbs and flows that once moved to a natural pulse are now dictated by the dam, breaking a cycle that sustains aquatic ecosystems and unraveling an entire way of life. Depleted fish stocks mean less healthy food and less income. Deprived of traditional ways of making a living, fishermen leave for Altamira, which has been called one of Brazil’s most violent cities.
Studies show compromised fish spawning grounds, high tree mortality, and increased siltation and erosion since the dam was built.
“Talking to you today is not easy for me or the Indigenous people,” says Rodrigues, eyes full of emotion. “We wanted to be here talking about the Volta Grande that I knew. We had life, we had health, we had an intact ecosystem.”
Now the water kept back from the Volta Grande props up a different way of life thousands of miles away. It generates energy for some 60 million people in the country’s south, including urban centers like Rio de Janeiro. Brazil relies on hydropower for more than 60 percent of its electricity. Up to 10 percent of that is provided by Belo Monte at full capacity; in 2023, a drought year, the plant met only 6 percent of Brazil’s consumption.
Hydropower will remain a big part of Brazil’s renewables mix in its quest to meet energy demands and climate goals, analysts say, even as investments in solar, wind, and biomass grow. Plugging the power production gaps of intermittent wind and solar is the top challenge for the country’s energy grid, according to Ricardo Baitelo, an engineer and project manager at Brazil’s Institute for Energy and Environment. But Belo Monte doesn’t solve that problem, he says, because its energy generation plummets in the dry season. “[Variation] is still a challenge, despite the dam being operational.”
Local communities began to monitor changes in their territory as the dam’s structures took shape, starting in 2013, and their tug of war with Norte Energia continues to this day through their appeals to IBAMA and in the courts. The energy company, which declined to comment for this article, has over the years insisted its plant leaves enough water in the river to maintain ecological health in the Volta Grande region. But residents, scientists, and environmental advocates have countered those claims with multi-year peer-reviewed studies that show high tree mortality, compromised fish spawning grounds, increased siltation and erosion, and hazards to navigation.
IBAMA has acknowledged those harms. It agreed to environmental mitigation plans with Norte Energia when the plant was first licensed, and again in 2021. But experts and advocates say those measures fall short of making up for the damage. In February, the company won a court case shutting down an earlier order by IBAMA to temporarily maintain high water levels downstream.
In August of 2022, the Yudjá took advantage of the pending license renewal and, working with a research coalition of scientists and river dwellers supported by the Brazilian NGO Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) and other institutions, offered the government their own version of a hydrograph, a technical plan that spells out how much water can be released at different times of the year. Named the Piracemas hydrogram, for the places and times during which fish swim upstream to spawn, the coalition’s plan calls for releasing enough water to maintain levels at roughly 70 to 80 percent of the historical average volume flowing into the Volta Grande over the course of a year. It would also smooth out abrupt changes in river flow to more closely mimic natural cycles.
The trade-off between water for the power grid and water for life on the river has always been at the root of the Belo Monte controversy.
The relicensing decision was expected by mid-2024, according to Felício Pontes Jr., a federal public ministry prosecutor in the state of Pará who has handled numerous legal challenges to Norte Energia. “We still don’t know if the government is taking the relicensing seriously because [it] has not yet decided how much water will be diverted to the plant,” he said. “We are waiting.” According to André Oliveira Sawakuchi, a professor of geosciences at the University of São Paulo who works with MATI, the research coalition that proposed the Piracemas hydrogram, government institutions have, so far, not seriously considered it.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior government official said that discussions are ongoing in what is effectively a silent conflict within the government. While the license is under review, the Ministry of Mines and Energy is pushing against changes to the existing hydrograph and for a greater role in monitoring social and environmental conditions linked with the dam’s operation. Both IBAMA and the Ministry of Mines and Energy declined interview requests. Meanwhile, Belo Monte is allowed to operate indefinitely on a temporary license.
The trade-off between water for the power grid and water for life on the river has always been at the root of the Belo Monte controversy, according to Sawakuchi. But the discussion is highly politicized. “When we get [to] the point to take a decision, you have this conflict between [the] social and environmental sector and the energy sector of the federal government,” he says, and so a decision is kicked down the road.
The Belo Monte Dam. Bruno Batista / VPR
It is unclear what bearing the intense drought of recent years will have on the relicensing decision. The Amazon River hit record low levels in 2023 and 2024. In the first three weeks of September 2024, Belo Monte worked at less than 3 percent of its full potential, a new low after failing to meet its projected capacity over most of its life.
At current trends, hydropower output is set to decline even further. Climate change impacts, including heat waves and drought, could cause the Xingu’s water levels to drop by up to 50 percent in coming decades, according to modeling studies by researchers at Brazilian and U.S. institutions. And scientists now see clear evidence that widespread deforestation, which reduces evapotranspiration, will soon lead to a tipping point in which the Amazon no longer generates its own rainfall, worsening drought and further undermining the dam’s generating capacity.
As the Belo Monte stalemate drags on, the hydropower complex continues to divert water. The Yudjá and ribeirinhos know there’s no going back, that life in their region of the Xingu will never be the same again. The goal is to save what’s left, and they believe their Piracemas hydrogram is the most realistic chance to do that. “Look, I’m not leaving Volta Grande,” says Rodrigues. “As long as there’s a single drop of water, I’m here. My children know that if something happens to me, they will continue the fight.”
