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Global Study Blasts Ills of Hydro Dams by Tom Spears , The Ottawa Citizen, Canada - 28 November 2000 Huge hydro dams have caused immense harm to rivers all over the world, poisoning fish, killing wildlife, breeding mosquitoes and flooding tens of millions of poor people off their lands, says a two-year global study.The World Commission on Dams reported yesterday that to keep building huge dams with electricity as their only goal has caused terrible social and economic destruction, and may cause open conflict. Besides, it says, dams are usually built late and far over budget. With 45,000 large dams carving up rivers around the world, it says in its final report, the debate over their future is "increasingly confrontational." Yet the commission also says large dams can be built in a way that harnesses the water's power without destroying the lives of people living near it. This position is vigorously opposed by environmental groups that say the dam-building industry must be stopped. And the timing of yesterday's report is likely to rekindle debate over the world's biggest dam project -- the Three Gorges dam under construction on China's Yangtze River. Canada has helped fund that project, which will force 1.2 million people from their homes. The commission was led by the World Bank -- a funding agency that helped build many large dams in the Third World -- and the World Conservation Union. The commission has no power. It will now disband and leave governments, international aid agencies and industry to do what they like with its findings. Dams "have made an important and significant contribution to human development, but in too many cases the social and environmental costs have been unacceptable, and often unnecessary," says the report, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making. Dams provide 19 per cent of the world's electricity, and water controlled by them allows 12 to 16 per cent of the world's food to be produced, it says. But to do this dam builders have forced between 40 million and 80 million people to leave their homes and farms. Their reservoirs are often dirty; at one Brazilian dam the builders left behind 350 barrels of defoliant that leaked and contaminated the water. Where dams do environmental damage, it adds, the efforts to repair this damage have "met with limited success." And even then, dams often don't work. Some work well for decades, but others -- like the Chamera Dam in India, built with Canadian aid -- have turbine problems or landslides, or fall prey to droughts and changes in water flow, and never deliver steady power. The commission calls on the dam industry to design its projects in ways that respect the environment, and to respect the rights of people living near their projects. Probe International, a Toronto organization that studies Third World development issues, says the report gives dam builders an excuse to keep building. The commission's mandate from the start included setting rules for future dam projects, with no thought that these should be stopped, said Probe's Grainne Ryder. "They're overly optimistic that damages can be mitigated and that dams can be fixed," she said. And she said the commission's call to bring people living near dam sites into the planning process won't be enough, because these are often poor people with few resources and no political power. Probe has spent more than 10 years opposing the Three Gorges dam, a massive project now under construction even though there's no solid plan to find new homes for the people it displaces. The dam will raise water levels in the steep-sided gorges for which it is named, and is intended to provide electricity and to control terrible floods on the river. The resulting reservoir will be longer than Lake Superior, and environmentalists warn it will cause erosion and landslides. Canada's Export Development Corp. lent $170 million to Chinese state agencies for the project. Canadian General Electric and Canadian engineering firm Monenco-Agra will provide computers and power generation equipment for the controversial project. The engineering firm SNC-Lavalin has also been involved in studies for the project. The dam, 182 metres high, is due to be ready in 2009, despite warnings from Chinese and international engineers that it will be an economic, environmental and archeological disaster.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 The World Commission on Dams | ||||||||||||||||||||||
