…Environmentalists in China are celebrating after controversial plans to build a series of giant hydroelectric dams on the country’s last free-flowing river were shelved. Activists have spent more than a decade campaigning to protect the Nujiang, or “angry river”, from a cascade of dams, fearing they would displace tens of thousands of people and irreparably damage one of China’s most spectacular and bio-diverse regions… [C]ampaigners said that appears to have happened after China’s State Energy Administration published a policy roadmap for the next five years that contained no mention of building any hydroelectric dams on the Nu…

[A]ctivists highlight three key reasons as to why Beijing may have decided to ditch plans to dam the Nu. One is the growing concern for the environment shown by China’s leaders, after decades in which economic growth was given precedence over environmental protection…A second explanation is concern over the wisdom of building such mega-projects in China’s seismically active south-west, where geologists warn of potentially catastrophic accidents were an earthquake to strike near such dams…Third, and perhaps most importantly, is the economics…difficulty of transmitting electricity from remote regions such as Yunnan to the rest of the country, means many believe large-scale dams no longer make financial sense…