Union Minister of Electricity and Energy U Win Khaing announced at a press conference on March 14 that the Myanmar government will not grant permission for the proposed 1,280 MW coal power plant in Hpa-An, Karen State. Local communities and civil society groups who have campaigned tirelessly against the proposed coal plant are celebrating this victory and welcome the news from the new Minister of Energy.

“We are very happy and appreciative to hear the announcement of the Union Minister that this project has been cancelled. Despite our happiness at the result, we remain cautious. We hope that state-level government representatives will help reduce our concerns by following in the footsteps of the Union Minister and announcing their support for the project’s cancellation.” said Saw Aung Than Htwe.

We, the undersigned 131 organizations and networks call on the Myanmar Union government to follow up on the Minister’s statement and officially cancel all proposed and suspended coal-fired power plants. We also call on the government to pass a national moratorium on coal power plants because of the devastating and irreparable harm they would cause to the environment and people of Myanmar. We further call on the government to create policies and laws to promote and regulate the implementation of sustainable renewable energy projects that are consistent with the needs and wishes of communities.

In April 2017, the Karen State Government (KSG) and Toyo Thai Power Myanmar Co Ltd (TTCL) signed a memorandum of understanding to conduct a feasibility study for the proposed Hpa-An coal plant. In June 2017, 42 Karen State-based civil society organizations and 130 other civil society organizations released a statement against the project. In October 2017, the KSG and TTCL signed joint venture and lease agreements for 815 acres with a concession period of 40 years. The proposed project site was on the Thanlwin (Salween) River. Local civil society groups collected around 2,980 signatures from Karen State residents who opposed the project and submitted them to the Karen State Chief Minister. In November 2017, local communities gathered to demonstrate against the project. Despite knowledge of this opposition, TTCL persuaded the KSG to organize people from Hpa-An to go and visit Hekinan coal-fired power plant in Japan in an attempt to influence and promote their project in Hpa-An.

“Although the project has been declared cancelled at Union level this remains unclear at state level. Public access to information on the project remains limited, and land has recently been purchased by TTCL in the project area,” said Saw Nay Lin Htun.

It was also reported that TTCL attempted to implement the Hpa-An project in Karen State after having failed to do so in Ann Dinn, Mon State. The local communities in Ann Dinn strongly opposed this project. Around 5,000 people protested the project in 2015, and a result of this strong and continuous opposition, the Ann Dinn project was cancelled.

Communities in Myanmar have continuously opposed coal-fired power plant projects throughout Myanmar, expressing serious concerns over forced relocation from their lands, pollution to the air and water, the resulting loss of livelihoods, and harmful consequences to their health. Renewable energy options also make projects such as the one proposed for Hpa-An unnecessary and inexcusable. Developing countries are installing renewable energy projects almost twice as fast as developed countries. Among the factors contributing to this shift is the decreasing cost of component materials and increasing efficiency of renewable energy technologies. In addition, renewable energy projects can bring electricity to communities across Myanmar much quicker than coal power plants and large hydropower projects.

Rural communities in Myanmar have already successfully implemented more than 3,500 off-grid sustainable renewable energy projects that are consistent with local energy needs and conserve existing natural resources
“This moment presents an opportunity to discuss steps towards sustainable and decentralized community-managed alternative energy, and to open space for clear and people-centered plans for energy governance,” said Saw Tha Phoe.

The global trend towards renewable energy is also due to increasing awareness worldwide that coal emissions are a primary contributor to climate change and cause devastating impacts to the environment and human health. If Myanmar continues to develop coal power projects, it will miss an opportunity to become a leader in renewable energy, instead sacrificing the health of its communities and the environment. There can be no justification for the continued use of fossil fuels for power generation.

Contact Person:

Saw Aung Than Htwe 09767413355

Saw Nay Lin Htun 09767253843

Saw Tha Phoe 09 445055659

Endorsing Organizations

1. ဖလုံပညာေရး ဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိးေရးယူနစ္
2. ကရင္အမ်ဳိးသမီးဖြံၿဖဳိးေရးအဖြဲ႕ (ကရင္ျပည္နယ္)
3. အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားကြန္ရက္ (ကရင္ျပည္နယ္)
4. ” ေျခလွမ္းသစ္ ” ဆယ္ေက်ာ္သက္လူငယ္မ်ား ဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိးေရးအဖြဲ႕
5. ကရင္သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ႏွင့္ လူမႈေရးဆုိင္ရာ လႈပ္ရွားမႈကြန္ရက္ (ကရင္ျပည္နယ္)
6. တရားမွ်တလြတ္လပ္ေသာ အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားကြန္ရက္
7. ကရင္လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအုပ္စု
8. Youth Heart လူငယ္ဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိးေရးအဖြဲ႕
9. ပြင့္လင္းလူငယ္အဖြဲ႕
10. ပအုိ၀္စာေပႏွင့္ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈတုိးတက္ျပန္႔ပြားေရးအသင္း(ကရင္ျပည္နယ္)
11. မြန္စာေပႏွင့္ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈတုိးတက္ျပန္႕ပြားေရးအသင္း (ကရင္ျပည္နယ္)
12. ဒီမုိကေရစီလႈပ္ရွားမႈဆုိင္ရာ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားအုပ္စု
13. ” ေထာင္းလယာ ့” ပညာေရးစုစည္းရာအဖြဲ႕
14. ” ဇြဲကပင္ေျမ ” လူမႈဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိးေရးအဖြဲ႕
15. MATA ကရင္ျပည္နယ္
16. အမ်ဳိးသမီးေရွ႕ေဆာင္အုပ္စု
17. လူငယ္အေျချပဳသင္ၾကားေရးစင္တာ
18. Youth Community Centre ( YCC)
19. ” အၾကင္နာမီးအိမ္ ” ပညာေရး၀န္ေဆာင္မႈအဖြဲ႕
20. ” ယူရီ ” ဘာသာစကား သင္ၾကားေလ့လာေရးစင္တာ
21. ” Gate Way ” ပညာေရးျမင့္တင္မႈစင္တာ
22. ဘားအံပညာေရးေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း
23. သံလြင္အေနာက္ျခမ္း လူမႈဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိးေရးအုပ္စု
24. ဗုဒၶဘာသာ မ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္လူငယ္ဆြမ္းေလာင္းအသင္း
25. ငါးနက္ျပာ လူမႈေရးအဖြဲ႕
26. Millennium Self Access Language Center
27. Bridge for All
28. SuriyaSanda Generation
29. ကရင္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားရိပ္သာ (KSC)
30. Research Institution for Society and Ecology (RISE)
31. Interfaith Youth Cooperation Action For Peace (IYCAP)
32. Thwee Development Network
33. ဘားအံလူငယ္ကြန္ရက္
34. မိကရင္လူငယ္အဖြဲြ႕
35. ဆာမူေထာ္ လူမႈဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႔
36. လူမူထာ လူမႈဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႔
37. ဟူးဖိုးကေပၚ လူမႈဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႔
38. ၀င္းဒရယ္သက္ေမြးအေထာက္အကူျပဳအဖြဲ႕
39. Karen Student Network Group (KSNG)
40. Thoo Mweh Khee Migrant School
41. Karen River Watch (KRW)
42. Karen Women Organization (KWO)

အျခားေသာျပည္နယ္မွ အရပ္ဘက္အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား
43. Myanmar – China Pipeline Watch Committee
44. Peace & Open Society (Kyaukse )
45. Myanmar Alliance for Transparency & Accountability (Mandalay)
46. Farmer Union (Kyaukse )
47. Green For All ( ႏြားထိုးႀကီးၿမိဳ႕နယ္ )
48. Green For All ( ေတာင္သာ )
49. စိမ္းလန္း မိုးကုတ္
50. ေရႊလုပ္သားမ်ား သမဂၢ (သပိတ္က်င္း ၿမိဳ႕နယ္)
51. စိမ္းလန္းျပင္ဦးလြင္
52. အေျခခံဥပေဒျပင္ဆင္ေရးျပည္သူ႔ကြန္ယက္
53. ေရၾကည္စမ္း
54. POPP (Peace for Peaceful Plurism)
55. ျမတ္၀န္းသစ္ (Myat Won Thit)
56. Myiny Ma Kha Guard
57. Public Network
58. EDU Wave
59. East Light Development Group
60. Bago Youth Network
61. အလင္းသက္တန္႔
62. ရိုးမခ်စ္သူ (Yoma Vhit Thu)
63. ေမာ္ကြန္းသစ္ (Maw Kun Thit)
64. သဲကုန္းလူငယ္အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (Thae Kone Youth League)
65. အလင္းေစတမန္ (Alin Say Ta Marn)
66. ေရႊရိပ္စစ္ (Shwe Yeik Sit)
67. ေရႊက်င္ခ်စ္သူ (Shwe Kyin Chit Thu)
68. မႈိင္းကြန္ယက္ (Hmine Network)
69. PACE-G (Political And Civil Engagement Group)
70. မြန္ျပည္နယ္ MATA အဖြဲ႕
71. မြန္ျပည္နယ္အရပ္ဘက္လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားကြန္ရက္
72. ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားသမဂၢ (မေကြး)
73. Simple Smile (ပခုကၠဴ)
74. ေမတၲာစမ္းေရၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနွင့္ လူမႈဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရးအဖဲြ႕
75. ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးနွင့္ နိုးၾကားေသာလူငယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႔
76. ေ႐ႊညာေျမ အမ်ဳိးသမီးဘဝဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအဖဲြ႔
77. အလုပ္သမား သမဂၢ(ေရႊေရာင္မ်ိဳးဆက္)
78. အလုပ္သမား သမဂၢ (ေထာက္ရွာပင္)
79. ေစတုတၱရာ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအဖြဲ႔႔
80. ဧရာဝတီျမစ္အေနာက္ဖက္ျခမ္းေဒသ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအင္အားစု ( ၉ – ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ )
81. ေက်းလက္လူငယ္ကြန္ယက္
82. သစ္ပင္ခ်စ္သူမ်ားအဖြဲ႔
83. ဧရာဝတီျမစ္အေနာက္ဖက္ျခမ္းေဒသ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအင္အားစု ( ငဖဲၿမိဳ႕နယ္ )
84. လြတ္လပ္ေသာအရိႈခ်င္းအမ်ိဳးသားအင္အားစု
85. ပြင့္ျဖဳဖြံၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအဖြဲ႔ ( PDO )
86. ရိုးမခ်င္းအဖြဲ႔ (ေစတုတၱရာ)
87. TANKS
88. Humanity Institute (HI)
89. Our Future Initiative (OFI)
90. Southern Youth
91. ေမတၱာလက္ကမ္း
92. ၿမိတ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတာင္သူလယ္သမား သမဂၢ
93. လမ္းစအဖြဲ႕
94. Tanintharyi Fisheries Partnership
95. Tanintharyi Green Network
96. Motherland
97. သယံဇာတေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ (တနသၤာရီ)
98. သယံဇာတေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ (ပေလာက္)
99. ၈၈ ပုေလာ
100. ၈၈ မ်ိဳးဆက္ (ၿမိတ္)
101. အမ်ိဳးသမီးမ်ား သမဂၢ (ၿမိတ္)
102. ေသြးခ်င္းသစၥာအဖြဲ႕
103. National Network for Education Reform (NNER) – Myeik
104. All Burma Students’ Democratic Front – ABSDF ရဲေဘာ္ေဟာင္းအဖြဲ႕
105. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender – LGBT
106. ဆရာမ်ားသမဂၢ (ၿမိတ္ခရိုင္)
107. သိေႏၶာ သယံဇာတ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ (တနသၤာရီ)
108. ၈၈ ေကာ့ေသာင္း
109. FLEGT ဘုတ္ျပင္း
110. ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားသမဂၢ(ေကာ့ေသာင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္)
111. ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕
112. ပါခ်န္ျမစ္ထိန္းသိမ္းေရးအဖြဲ႕
113. OFI (ဘုတ္ျပင္း)
114. Tanintharyi Fisheries Partnership
115. Dawei Development Association – DDA
116. ေပါက္တိုင္းေခ်ာင္းဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးေကာ္မတီ
117. Dawei Watch Fundation
118. ကလုံးထာ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရး ေကာ္မတီ
119. Cambridge Student Liberal Democrats – CSLD
120. သတၱဳတြင္းေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕
121. မုိင္းပန္လူငယ္အစည္းအ႐ုံး – MPYA
122. ကရင္နီျပည္လူငယ္မ်ားသမဂၢ – UKSY
123. ကယန္းမ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္လူငယ္ – KNGY
124. ကယန္းအမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအ႐ုံး – KyWO
125. ကရင္နီအမ်ဳိးသားလူငယ္အစည္းအ႐ုံး – KNYO
126. ကရင္နီျပည္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသမဂၢ – KSSU – တစ္သီးပုဂၢလတက္ၾကြလႈပ္ရွားသူမ်ား
127. သံလြင္ခ်စ္သူအဖြဲ႔
128. Mong Pan Youth Association
129. သံလြင္သားခ်င္းမ်ား
130. သံလြင္ျမစ္ ထိန္းသိမ္းကာကြယ္ေရးကြန္ရက္ (SSN)
131. EarthRights International

Download this statement in English HERE.

ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခ်က္ ျမန္မာဘာသာကုိ ဤေနရာတြင္ ရယူႏုိင္သည္။