Why do so many people so suddenly hate dams? One answer may have to do with the worldview of the people confronting dams. If you are used to freely running rivers, even if they’re just burbling brooks, and if migrating salmon or trout are part of your identification with nature, you will be predisposed to see dams as intrusive, as barricades, as obstacles. If, on the other hand, your worldview is shaped by the fact that rivers where you live run only a few months or a few weeks a year and are otherwise dry, you are more likely to regard large dams as insurance, as saving for the future, as risk mitigators, as artifacts that will help keep you alive in bad times. Some of the dissonance, surely, is caused by people from group one extrapolating their experience, and their preconceptions, to group two.
There are good reasons not to like dams, but the opposition expresses a special antipathy not really explainable by fact. As John McPhee put it in The New Yorker, “There is a special animus that environmental activists hold for dams. To them, there is something disproportionately and metaphysically sinister about dams. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam.”1
But the dam story is more interesting than that. It is not just that, in my view, anti-dam people have caused more harm than good by their adamancy (or at least prevented much good from being done) but that they succeeded over the last few decades in bullying the World Bank into submission. Who would have thought? The bogeyman of the anti-globalization folk meekly submitting to activists with a better sense of politics than they had.
That’s changing now. The spell seems to be wearing off. Whether this is a good thing remains to be seen.
In 1900, there were no dams in the world higher than fifteen metres. By 1950 there were 5,270, two of them in China. Thirty years later, there were 36,562, of which no fewer than 18,820 were in China. Best guess is that by 2010 the number had reached 45,000; it’s a little uncertain because the metric often varies — sometimes it is said there are so many dams higher than fifteen metres, or higher than five metres, or taller than four storeys. There are said to be in the United States alone 60,000 dams, or 85,000 — the numbers vary, and certainly many of these dams are tiny. Still, our species has built a very large dam about every hour for more than forty years, and has dammed more than half the world’s rivers, whose watersheds cover two-fifths of the earth’s surface, several hundred of them crossing international boundaries. The binge is slowing now, mostly because there are few rivers left worth damming, and because the opposition, while beaten back by the World Bank, is still vigorous.
The Campaign against Dams
The campaign for, and then against, the World Commission on Dams is the best way of understanding the complicated politics of dams, their funding, and the even more complicated issue of corporate involvement. Major dams have almost always been the creatures of national or state governments, but they have almost always been built by consortia of private water or construction companies. Their financing is often opaque, their real cost often obscured, their benefits often exaggerated, and their ecological damage too often left unexamined.
The activist campaigns against dams that arose through the 1980s were essentially a glomming together of two hitherto unconnected ideas. The first, a product of the environmental movement in its more purist incarnation, was the notion that any interference with natural water systems, even flood-control dikes, was damaging and should be contested. A raft of criticisms of dams accumulated, ranging from interference with fish habitats, to salinity caused by the consequent irrigation, to the risk of dam breaches. Most of these criticisms were valid. The second idea was developed by a different set of NGOs, those who called themselves social justice activists, and who were, without exception, anti-globalization and often anti-market. These concentrated on the displacement of people, usually the poor, caused by the construction of large dams. They were able to point to multiple examples, mostly from the early decades of dam building, where local populations had been uprooted, their livelihoods lost, with little or no compensation contemplated or given. This has now been widely acknowledged, and even most pro-dam interests agree that major “interventions” like dams create winners and losers and have a big impact on the economy, on the environment, and on specific groups of people who deserve to be, but often aren’t, consulted. It is also generally agreed that the losers, referred to in the careful prose of international financial documents as people in “unmanaged resettlements,” have been generally given short shrift.
The catalyst for larger action was the campaign against World Bank funding for the Sardar Sarovar dam on India’s Narmada River. This dam, an integral part of India’s determination to build what Nehru once called “the cathedrals of modern India,” was to be huge, at the time the second largest in the world. It would provide irrigation water for nearly half a million people and enough power for a dozen major cities. It would also submerge a number of fishing villages whose residents were not consulted — they were just told to move: move or drown. One of the villages was a hamlet called Manni Belli.
In June 1994, a concerted NGO effort was launched to bring opprobrium to the World Bank on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. The International Rivers network, already a force in the anti-dam movement, teamed up with local activists to issue the Manni Belli Declaration that, among other things, demanded a moratorium on World Bank funding for dams, anywhere. Tactically, the focus on a few hapless villagers, instead of the millions who were clamouring for more reliable electricity, was a success. The villagers, or more accurately, the NGOs operating in their name, called in the prominent Indian social activist Medha Patkar to help. By then the dam was half built, and there wasn’t much left of Manni Belli: only the tip of its temple roof was showing above the rising water. That didn’t matter. Medha Patkar and her organizers pushed for an immediate stop-work order to the whole thing. In March 1998, a court order halted construction of the dam for a “review period” of three years.
The builders were furious: the millions that had been spent would be wasted if the dam was never completed — there are few things more useless, and unusable, than an unfinished billion-dollar dam. The protesting villagers of Manni Belli who had previously been ignored were now roughed up by hired security thugs, and several of the village women were raped. Patkar was herself beaten and jailed. That was a big tactical mistake.
Even before this, the World Bank, which had recently lost the throw-a-billion-here, throw-a-billion-there muscularity it had expressed under the technocratic Robert McNamara, had been cautiously shifting its focus from the financing of infrastructure megaprojects to something approaching the Millennium Development Goals — financing projects for education, women’s empowerment, health, water and sanitation services, and small-is-beautiful projects on scales of small to tiny. The new World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, was trying to navigate between his technocratic traditionalists and the heat he was feeling in the United States from the anti-globalists and was, so far, having only moderate luck. The bank was “owned” by the 180-plus countries that comprised it, most of them intent on development and still impervious to the environmental and social justice activism that was becoming so effective in rich countries. The United States, though, was not impervious. With American politicians beginning to feel the heat — this was before the Tea Party and the rise of Republican anti-government activism — it was becoming harder to justify what seemed to be rough treatment of indigenous peoples, even if the governments of those people, in most cases democratically elected, were the ones doing the roughing. The change was swift enough. The World Bank started as an infrastructure bank, but by the late 1990s, only 5 percent of the bank’s lending was still for infrastructure. The bank was essentially out of the dam business.
The Sardar Sarovar fracas greatly spooked the bank’s leadership. It did, in fact, yank its financing for the project, and the bank’s Operations Evaluations Department was ordered to do a review of the fifty most recent dams built with bank financing. In another tactical mistake, it informed the leading NGO in the Sardar Sarovar fight, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, that the study was underway. The union’s leadership immediately interpreted this as a capitulation to their earlier demand for the cessation of dam building, and as an offer to provide the draft text to them for evaluation and criticism.
In September 1996, the completed review was circulated among senior bank staff, but as the International Rivers campaigns director Patrick McCully put it in a press release, “The OED failed to meet its commitment to circulate drafts to NGOs for comment, and the full review was never published.” Never mind that no such commitment had ever been made. Only a redacted report was publicly released, which concluded that “the benefits of large dams far outweighed their costs,” and that because “thirty-seven of the large dams in this review (74 percent) are acceptable or potentially acceptable, suggests that, overall, most large dams were justified.” To the anti-dam people, this clearly wouldn’t do.
Still, a meeting was arranged among World Bank officials, dam builders and dam haters. The symposium met in in Gland, Switzerland, in 1997, and was the creature of a senior World Bank executive, John Briscoe, as was the creation of the World Commission on Dams that followed.
At first, the meeting seemed to go nowhere. After its first sessions, International Rivers’ McCully issued a press release saying that “participants at the workshop largely agreed that [the bank’s study] was based on inadequate data and flawed methodology.” This wasn’t actually true. Only a few participants — the anti-dam ones — had agreed to any such thing. Others, like the Egyptian scientist Aly Shady, then president of the International Water Resources Association and president of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, asserted that “existing and new dams will continue to play a major role in the [water] management system.” Despite this inauspicious start, everyone attending agreed upon Briscoe’s prodding to set up a World Commission on Dams, the WCD.
Briscoe’s, and the World Bank’s, position on the new creation was a calculated mix of co-option (bring the opponents to the table), of genuine recognition that dams did have problems, and of the slightly innocent assumption that a fact-based and objective report would conclude that dams should continue to be built. As Briscoe put it, “The substantive reason [for creating the WCD] is obvious — major interventions like dams create winners and losers, and have major impacts on the economy, on specific groups of people and on the environment. There are many cases where large dams have been the foundation for economic development and well-being of whole countries or regions. No arid country has become rich without extensive investment in water-retaining dams. And no mountainous country has become rich without tapping most of its hydroelectric potential.” Then he repeated what many critics had already said, that “these benefits were so obvious that for decades too little attention was given to the negative impacts of dams and, particularly, to the devastating effects which unmanaged resettlement had on millions of poor people. While there are many cases [China, Brazil, Colombia, Senegal, Japan, India, Pakistan, and Canada] in which resettled people have become, as they should, the first beneficiaries of dams, there are too many other cases (more frequent in the early decades of major dam building in the developing world, but persisting in some countries still) where the plight of affected people has been given insufficient attention.”2
Briscoe therefore hoped a WCD report would recognize the problems and provide ways for dealing with them, clearing the air so that matters could move forward productively. A commission that included among its members representatives of financing agencies and the dam industry would be unlikely to produce a one-note report, he felt. And if the anti-dam people signed off on it, so much the better. The commission was “heavily stacked with anti-dam activists,” as he put it later, but “it was my judgment that they would be counterbalanced by some excellent professionals and politicians who had a broader view of the issue. I also believed — incorrectly, it turned out — that the secretary general, a person of great capability, would play a moderating, balancing role.”
The position of the anti-dam people was considerably more uncompromising and, in the aftermath, activists like Patrick McCully cheerfully admitted it. I was led to McCully’s 2001 summation of the process that appeared in the American University International Law Review by Briscoe, who called it the only account he had read that accurately reflected how the process actually worked.3
Whereas Briscoe believed that a proper review of dams would be cautiously pro-dam, McCully believed that a “thorough and unbiased review of the actual impacts of dams” would show them to be overwhelmingly negative and portray them as the horrors they were. As to why the dam activists agreed to join a commission that included dam promoters and builders, it is hard not to agree with Briscoe that McCully’s analysis was “breathtakingly audacious.”
First, McCully described how to use a process apparently set up to find common ground to further the interests of only one party; in his formulation, “to adopt Clausewitz’s famous phrase, the WCD was a mere [continuation] of the anti-dam struggle by other means.” He recognized that a “multi-stakeholder commission” would be unlikely to take a firm no-dams stance, but he and his colleagues would see to it that “such a commission could set strict criteria for future dams, that, if followed, would prevent most destructive dams from going forward, promote better alternatives, and help promote recognition of the need for reparations for past damage due to dam construction.”
His second tactic was how to sideline possible critics:
The largely successful efforts of Commissioners and staff to keep the World Bank’s influence at a minimum were also critical to the WCD’s success. Several pro-dam governments attacked the process at one time or another, but their efforts were never coordinated or effective. The Chinese and Indian governments both withdrew from the process after initially welcoming it, and, in doing so, only ensured that they could do little to influence its outcome. . . . The exclusion of governments from substantive power in the process was also vital. Had the governments of leading dam-building nations like Brazil, China, India, Japan or Turkey formed an organized bloc within the Reference Group, it is almost certain that their coalition would have destroyed the Commission’s potential to issue a progressive report.
Thus: work within the process to sideline governments and bodies like the World Bank so that “organized civil society” could assure that its own recommendations were successful.
What were these recommendations? What did the WCD report actually say? Much of it was anodyne, as McCully had predicted, including bland generalities such as “shared values.” In fact, at first it seemed something of a bust because no one quite understood what it was recommending. It even came under assault from some of the anti-dam activists, who denounced it as resolutely refusing to take sides. But buried deep in the report were a series of guidelines for the construction and financing of future dams. Were these guidelines ever to become mandatory — if governments and financing agencies actually adopted them — it is likely that no more large dams would be built, anywhere. And that the word “compliance” kept popping up throughout the report (Briscoe counted sixty instances of the word in just one chapter) suggested that everyone (lenders and borrowers) would have to comply — the “guidelines” would be mandatory. The activists knew very well that “comply with guidelines” would be, to the World Bank staff, an absolute. Comply or don’t comply: it was a yes or no idea, a zero-tolerance concept.
Most of the guidelines were unexceptional. But a couple of them spelled trouble for the construction of future dams. For example, a government’s right to exercise eminent domain (even with compensation) would be replaced by a guideline that would require “free, prior, and informed consent” for all indigenous peoples, thus giving them a de facto veto over construction. Another guideline said that international financial agencies (aka the World Bank) would be required to withhold all future funding until “legacy issues” on all prior dams had been resolved (my emphasis). Third, all countries that were not in “good faith dialogue on shared rivers” with all their neighbours would be denied funding from development banks for any purpose in any way related to water.
You can see what McCully means: if the bank adopted those guidelines as prescriptive — no more dams.
In the end, though, it was a pyrrhic victory, and short-lived. When the WCD report came out (strategically leaked to anti-dam activists), even a largely sympathetic World Bank president Jim Wolfensohn blinked. “The critical test,” he said at the report’s launch, “will be whether our borrowing countries and project financiers accept the recommendations of the commission and want to build on them.”4
That “whether” was trouble for the McCully crowd. Mark Halle, a veteran Canadian environmental campaigner, suggested that “the Bank had said it would follow WCD’s recommendations whatever they were” and that “NGOs are convinced that the bank has come under strong pressure from commercial concerns not to abide by the WCD report.”5 After China, Brazil, Nepal, Turkey, and India all declared that they refused to accept the guidelines, Briscoe and his colleagues were accused of strong-arming these governments, a fairly risible idea. (“Have you ever tried strong-arming the government of China?” Briscoe asked afterward.)
Essentially what happened was that the so-called MICs, or middle income countries, balked at being told by citizens of countries that had completed their infrastructure programs decades earlier that they were not to follow suit. In the aftermath, Briscoe became the lead author in the World Bank’s Water Sector Strategy, which kindly acknowledged the work of the WCD but sidelined the guidelines for good. By 2014, the World Bank itself was in turmoil. Its new president, Jim Yong Kim, was radically restructuring the bank, diminishing its country and regional executives, and centralizing power at headquarters. Under this restructuring, fourteen “thematic global practices” were listed as the bank’s priorities, and water was one. Some five hundred employees were laid-off, leading to the bizarre sight of a mass demonstration of disgruntled besuited bankers inside the headquarters atrium. The president was derided as an outsider who didn’t understand the institution he was running (he was a former health care expert and president of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire). By this time, the bank was financing only a few dams worldwide. Its water priorities were settling elsewhere. In this same year, the Chinese were financing more than two hundred dams outside their own country. World Bank backing represented less than 2 percent of projected investment.
But the Sardar Sarovar dam story has a coda. Early in 2014, just a few weeks after Narendra Modi was elected India’s prime minister, the Narmada Control Authority was given permission to raise the dam’s level by seventeen metres (from 121.9 to 138.7), making it the second highest dam in the world after Grand Coulee in the United States. The new height would increase hydro generation by 40 percent, and allow irrigation of a further “6.8 lakh hectares” (one lakh is one hundred thousand). It would also affect another two hundred thousand people, drowning the densely populated villages and farmland in the Nimad area of Madhya Pradesh.
None of this was surprising. The increase would benefit, above all, Gujarat State, as well as neighbouring Rajasthan. Before becoming prime minister, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat and had regularly demanded the increase from the central government.
Also unsurprising was the protest by Medha Patkar, still the head of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Indian anti-dam group. “The government, she declared, “has neither given us any hearing nor has it taken any time nor made any attempt to know the ground reality before deciding on the dam’s height.” Greenpeace chimed in, calling the decision “antithetical to the government’s promise of inclusive development. With this, the BJP government in Gujarat has served a blow to the Narmada Bachao Andolan and all of us who stand in solidarity with the grave impact of the impacted communities and the environment.”6
A little more surprising was the political reaction, much savvier than it had been in the earlier go-rounds — no beatings or jailings, just a carefully worded statement from India’s water minister, Uma Bharti: “The decision was taken [after consultation with] the ministry of social justice [on the] empowerment of the rehabilitation of displaced people. Social justice . . . officials are 100 percent satisfied [of the measures being taken by the affected states].”7
One hundred percent is no doubt overstating the case, by a considerable margin. But there it rests.
Do Dams Still Make Sense?
Setting the politics of anti-privatization and anti-globalization aside, do massive dams still make sense? This is difficult to assess, given the extravagant claims being made on both sides. The anti-dam people have made their objections admirably clear: dams are really just “brute-force, Industrial Age artifacts that rarely deliver what they promise,” as the writer Jacques Leslie put it in 2014.8 And dam proponents are just as likely to oversell on the other side, with dams being trumpeted as a ticket to national independence and prosperity.
Early in 2014, a team of Oxford researchers, most of them dam skeptics, weighed in with some numbers. They reviewed 245 dams over fifteen metres high built between 1934 and 2007 and found that virtually all of them ran over their approved budget, by almost 100 percent on average, and they took an average of eight years to build, far longer than their proponents had claimed.9 Dam projects are so huge, they concluded, that cost overruns became contributors to the debt crises in Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, and the former Yugoslavia. To some degree, these cost overruns are simply a fact of modern life. Megaprojects cost so much and their benefits are often so elusive that proponents almost always lowball the numbers just to get them off the ground, the modern Olympics being a case in point. Further, while the completed hydroelectric dams did provide power, in almost every case it was not nearly as much as their proponents had promised.
But do the Oxford numbers mean that dams are not economically viable? Anti-dam people ask whether fragile economies can afford the tremendous outlays dams require. Besides, foreign companies from richer economies are almost always required to build the things and, they argue, that much of the investment flows back out of the country as a result.
Pro-dam people suggest that dams give economies stability and resilience, and are one of the underpinnings of robust economic growth. Besides, fragile economies have shallow capital markets, and bringing in foreign investment is the proper way to stimulate growth. That is also the classic argument for allowing the privatization of water supply.
An interesting case study to this point is the recently built, but almost-scuttled, dam at the Bujagali Falls on the Nile River, a little below the Ugandan town of Jinja on the shores of Lake Victoria.
When I first went to Jinja more than a decade ago, I drove down to Cliff Road (there really isn’t a cliff) to peer at the small plaque marking the Source of the Nile, as it is called hereabouts (a claim vigorously disputed by, among other claimants, Burundi, where there is a small village defiantly named Le Source de Nil). In fact, there seem to be many claimants for ultimate headwater, and Uganda itself now tactfully claims only to be the source of the “Nile proper.” When I was there, the water from Lake Victoria poured prettily into its new channel, but there was otherwise not much to see. A busload of German tourists was snapping away, and three Russians with fishing poles were staring morosely at their empty bait buckets. Just downstream, however, out of sight from Jinja were the Bujagali Falls, now obliterated, to the fury of the International Rivers people, by the Bujagali power station.
The Bujagali project was proposed by Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, to help overcome his country’s chronic lack of energy. Adding 250 megawatts to the Ugandan grid would not only help extend that grid but also substitute for the ruinous costs of diesel generation, to that point the only alternative. The 250-megawatt capacity sounds trivial by the standards of, say, California (where the International Rivers people are based), but it would nevertheless bring electricity for the first time to towns and villages that needed it. The World Bank was involved from about 2003, but its presence faded after vociferous opposition, later returning in a more limited way. The financing was complicated, but typical of such projects. Besides the World Bank, other investors came in and bailed out, sometimes more than once. The consortium that finally brought the project to fruition was under the umbrella of Bujagali Energy, which selected an Italian dam-building company, Salini, for construction. Bujagali Energy was partly funded by Industrial Promotion Services (Kenya) and SG Bujagali Holdings, an “affiliate” of Sithe Global Power of the United States, itself a subsidiary of the Blackstone Group, a private equity and investment fund based in New York. A senior partner in Bujagali Energy was the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development.
Sebastian Mallaby, in his wildly entertaining book The World’s Banker, takes up the story: “Western NGOs were in revolt: the International Rivers Network . . . proclaimed that the Ugandan environmental movement was outraged at the likely damage to the Bujagali waterfalls, and that the poor people near the site would be uprooted from their land and livelihood.” The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation was similarly miffed and offered its support. Then, his own bias peeping out, Mallaby suggested that “the activists’ resistance had tied up the Bank for several years, delaying a project that would get electricity to clinics and schoolrooms that lacked lights and to industries whose productivity was wrecked by a lack of reliable energy.”10 As it turned out, the outraged Ugandan environmentalists numbered fewer than two dozen, and the villagers, when Mallaby consulted them, were delighted, not angry, to be included — the only angry ones were those who lived just beyond the periphery of the new dam and who would have loved to have been expropriated for compensation.
This was a pristine example of the moral hazard dogging development, in which unelected people who have steady jobs and reliable energy and plenty of money and as much food as they need take on the burden of deciding for those who have none of those things what is good for them and their society. In the end, the Bujagali power system, the third largest in the country, was inaugurated in October 2012 by Museveni and the Aga Khan. World Bank officials were there, but not in the front row.
The first major benefit of dams is the generation of hydroelectric power. It remains true today that almost 80 percent of the world’s renewable energy comes from hydro, with the others (photovoltaics, wind, and the rest) at just a few percentage points. Growing fast, yes, but from a tiny base. For the foreseeable future, only hydro will be able to produce power on the scale of fossil fuels, more than a dozen times the capacity of all other renewables, including solar, wind, geothermal, tidal power, and waste incineration. In fact, hydro is the second biggest producer of the world’s electricity, 16.2 percent of the global total in 2012. Rivers are ubiquitous, and some form of hydro power is developed in at least 160 countries. Four countries in the world generate all their electricity via hydro, and fifteen others reached at least 90 percent.11
The secondary benefit of hydro power is that, once built, it requires no fuel, so a gigawatt produced saves not only a gigatonne of emissions but also all the energy that would have gone into mining the fossil fuel in the first place. And, as Denmark and Norway have amply proved, large reservoirs can act as storage devices for intermittent alternative energies that can then be tapped at will — it is much easier to spin up or down a hydro plant than a coal generator.
As always, Colorado’s Hoover dam is everyone’s favourite example. Not only was it completed before its deadline and came in $15 million under budget, but the cheap power it produced is widely credited with jump-starting the American economy as it emerged from the Depression. The same is true elsewhere. India’s economy has been greatly helped by the cheap (and stable) power that dams produce, which is one reason the Sardar Sarovar dam was pushed to completion. Laos and Vietnam are both dam creators that are now electricity exporters — hydro is a large cash crop for both countries. Little Bhutan is a dam builder too, and Nepal is heading the same way. Brazil has indulged in a binge of new dams, some of them, to the fury of environmentalists, in the Amazon basin — Brazil remains resolutely pro-dam. Canada too. Without Canada’s hydro resources, the country’s not-very-admirable greenhouse gas emissions would be considerably worse. In the 1970s and 1980s, the government of Quebec, through its state-owned Hydro Québec (the world’s largest hydro power, generating more than thirty-six gigawatts for its customers, most of them far to the south), built a veritable cascade of dams in the Canadian northlands, the austere home of the nomadic Cree people. No fewer than eight dams were constructed in the James Bay area, and a dozen others are scattered through the north, some of them immense: the overflow spillway of the Robert-Bourassa dam, until China’s Three Gorges the world’s largest, can take twice the volume of the St. Lawrence River. The neighbouring province of Newfoundland and Labrador has put up the Churchill Falls barrages, a series of dikes rather than a single dam but having the same effect on the environment, creating a reservoir so large that it alone generates 1 percent of the world’s total hydroelectric supply. A new series of reservoirs is being built, and an undersea cable to Nova Scotia will siphon off some of its power and pass the rest through to the insatiable American market.
Some poorer countries with massive hydropower potential, such as Nepal (where anti-dam campaigners are active), currently exploit only about 1 to 10 percent of their hydro potential, whereas on average, rich countries have exploited somewhere around 70 percent. The International Hydropower Association points out that Europe has exploited around three-quarters of its potential sites — the rest are either technically difficult or in scenic areas beloved of national tourist boards. So there is plenty of room for expansion.
Bhutan, for example, famous as the first country to try to replace gross national product with gross national happiness, was finding at the end of the first decade of this century that paying to get there was becoming problematic. Money can’t buy happiness — this it knew. But without money, happiness seemed elusive, and this it was still learning. One way was to make money by selling surplus hydroelectric power to India — Bhutan’s domestic needs amounted to only 300 megawatts of generating capacity, but the dams it had built yielded 1,480, plenty to spare. In 2013, the little country declared that it would build a new array of dams that would increase its capacity to a substantial 10,000 megawatts. The anti-dam people contested the whole notion, but as of 2014 seemed to be losing.12
The James Bay Project in Canada proved that major plants can be sited a very long way from customers, and in some very hostile territory, which implies that many of the Siberian rivers are themselves exploitable. Dams there will almost certainly be built because costs are reasonable, producing power in the same price range as coal. With enough investment, and if local and environmentalist outrage are sidetracked, hydro could be scaled up to produce two and a half terawatts of potential electricity, a respectable proportion of global energy demand — more, in fact, than the total global electricity demand in 2012, and a good piece of the world’s total energy use, which is fifteen terawatts. Hydropower will double in China in the next twenty years, and triple in India and Africa, according to International Energy Agency projections.
The second rationale for constructing large dams is for water storage — in wet periods for use in dry ones, for irrigation, and for direct human consumption. I have an inbuilt bias to appreciate this argument, for my grandfather’s farm in an arid part of South Africa would not have been viable without the earthen dam he built to contain the sparse rain that did fall, often in torrents. The same thing is true of massive dams. Again, the Hoover dam is an obvious example; the Colorado reservoirs, even as they reached historic low levels in 2015, provide useful water for much of the parched Southwest, including the city of Las Vegas, that could hardly exist without it.
This kind of storage is not necessary where the rains are plentiful, such as Maine, for example, and the American Pacific Northwest, where they are actually decommissioning dams that seem to have outlived their usefulness. Still, most rich countries, as national averages, have around 5,000 cubic metres of stored water for every citizen, poor countries much less: India and Pakistan have less than 150 cubic metres of storage, most of Africa less than that. Pakistan can store only thirty days of the average flow of the Indus River, for example, whereas Australia’s Murray-Darling system can store more than a thousand days’. This means that such countries remain much more vulnerable to droughts and to unexpected changes in rainfall patterns than rich countries, exaggerating existing inequalities.
Dams can also mitigate the effects of climate change. To take just one example, and staying with Pakistan, some of the water in the Indus River comes from glacial melt. If these glaciers retreat, as climate forecasts predict, does this mean the water is lost? No, the water will still fall, but more of it will fall as rain and will no longer be released slowly in the warmer months. Instead, it will run through to the sea. More storage in dams would ameliorate the change and act as a buffer in the dry season. The same thing has happened in hundreds of places around the world. The Columbia River that flows from Canada into the United States is a rich-world example: dams provide a net increase in the availability of water in dry periods and flood protection in wet times. The building of a series of large dams in the little landlocked country of Lesotho has provided reliable water to South Africa’s Vaal River system on which the metropolis of Johannesburg depends, and provides poor Lesotho with some much-needed foreign currency.
It is precisely these two attributes — that dams generate clean energy and that dams store water for bad times — that make the visceral opposition to dams feel so old-fashioned. I liked the reaction of the reviewers for the website Grist, who in 2014 were commenting on a movie called Night Moves (in which two young greenies decide to blow up a dam in Oregon):
One of the most annoying things about this movie . . . is that it totally misses the zeitgeist of today’s environmental activism. In this century, what drives people out to the streets and even encourages some to risk arrest is climate change and dirty energy. The environmental radicals in this movie don’t make a single mention of climate change. They want to blow up a dam because it hurts salmon. What is this, 1975? That’s when the idea of blowing up a dam was fresh, when Edward Abbey wrote his classic novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.13
The third attribute of dams is flood control, and here the evidence of benefits is ambiguous.
China, as always, provides a good example. One of the reasons for building the Three Gorges dam in China was to ameliorate flooding on the Yangtze, flooding that had killed more than 100,000 in 1911, 140,000 in 1931, 142,000 in 1935, and 30,000 in 1954. In 1998, a major catastrophe was narrowly averted when the riverbanks overflowed and threatened retaining dikes. Had they broken, hundreds of thousands more would have died, and several major industrial cities would have been inundated. As it was, more than 2,000 people drowned, 13.8 million were driven from their homes, 2.9 million houses were destroyed, and 9 million hectares of crops ruined (3 percent of the national total). The floods affected an area inhabited by more than 240 million people, a fifth of China’s considerable population.
There are many reasons the Yangtze floods so often. The main natural one is the river’s length: it is the longest river in Asia, stretching sixty-three hundred kilometres from its source in China’s northwest Qinghai Province to its mouth at Shanghai on the East China Sea. The rainy season is May and June in areas south of the Yangtze, and July and August to its north, so the wet season is effectively doubled every year. There are human-caused reasons too. Massive deforestation upstream has removed the natural protections that once cushioned the flow. By some estimates, the Yangtze basin, home to four hundred million people, has lost 85 percent of its original forest cover. “The forests that once absorbed and held huge quantities of monsoon rainfall, which could then slowly percolate into the ground, are now largely gone,” said then head of the Worldwatch Institute Lester Brown shortly after the most recent disaster.
Three kinds of flooding happen along the river: in the upper reaches, in the lower reaches, and river-long floods. The dam can control only the third type, though it is fair to say that the floods that do still happen upstream of the dam have been diminished in their downstream severity.
This is true of dams elsewhere. They help with flooding. They are not a cure.
The downsides of dams are easy to see. Even their builders acknowledge them.
The careless displacement of populations is the most obvious one, as the World Bank’s Briscoe has acknowledged. When Stalin built the series of dams on the Volga River called the Volga cascade, the stepped reservoirs he created submerged hundreds of towns and villages. In typical Soviet fashion, many of the residents were not apprised of what was happening and had to scramble to avoid the rising waters. And when the Kariba dam on the Zambezi River in southern Africa was built in the 1950s, Lake Kariba, the reservoir formed by the dam, became nearly three hundred kilometres long and some thirty wide, one hundred metres at its deepest point, with lush shoreline and dozens of islands. These islands became famous in the 1950s as a rescue operation called Operation Noah issued a worldwide alert for the thousands of stranded animals that would otherwise have drowned (airlifts for stranded elephants and giraffes became a staple of nightly newscasts). Independence movements at the time — for these were still colonies, white-ruled under the short-lived and widely hated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland — pointed out snidely that more concern had been expressed in Europe and the Americas for elephants and leopards than for the fifty thousand Tonga-speaking people who’d been forced to evacuate without an airlift. And in 2014, more than fifty years after the Kariba dam was built, Tonga villages still have no access to electricity.
In another example, Norway is often trotted out as a paragon of green — much of its energy comes from dozens of often small hydro dams — but the country’s state-owned energy company, Statkraft, has been financing a series of controversial dams in Laos, India, and Borneo. One of them, a joint-venture dam in Laos, displaced forty-eight hundred people and has been causing flooding, erosion, and loss of fisheries on which thousands depend.14 Another Statkraft project, in Sarawak, displaced ten thousand people and caused thousands of hectares of tropical forests to be cut down.
The World Commission on Dams report cites several other instances of such displacements. In Mexico, the Papaloapan River Commission set fire to the houses of indigenous Mazatecs who refused to move for the Miguel Alemán dam. In 1978, police killed four people when they fired at an anti-resettlement rally at Chandil dam in the state of Bihar, in India. In Nigeria in April 1980, police fired at people blocking roads in protest against the Bakolori dam. And in 1985, 376 Maya Achi Indians, most of them women and children, were murdered in the course of clearing the area to be submerged by the Chixoy dam in Guatemala.
Of course, all this was not the fault of dams. It was the consequence of bad policy, usually by governments careless of their own citizens’ welfare. It could easily have been avoided and the dams still built. One good outcome of the anti-dam crusade has been that their builders and funders, including the World Bank, are now much more scrupulous about displacements than they were. The dams in Lesotho, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, and the dam at Jinja, on the Nile in Uganda, reveal this new face of dam construction.
Even so, problems persist, and in March 2015, the World Bank issued a sheepish mea culpa, acknowledging that it had repeatedly failed to follow its own rules regarding evictions and displacements. “We took a hard look at ourselves on resettlement and what we found cause me deep concern,” the bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, put it. He admitted that the bank didn’t know how many people its projects had displaced, or what had happened to them. He promised to do better.15
And then there is sediment. Dams — all dams — silt up, for dams have a natural lifespan depending on the silt level of the rivers they contain. In certain rocky areas with poor soil (like Lesotho), dams will last for a long time, perhaps for a thousand years, though no one knows for sure. In other cases, like the Nile at Aswan, rivers that once ran brown with silt are now running clear downstream from their dams. By some calculations, somewhere between 0.5 and 1 percent of dam capacity worldwide is lost through sedimentation every couple of years. In some cases, heavy sediment can erode turbines and block intakes.
Nor are dams immune to collapse. By one measure, dam collapses have killed more people than earthquakes or volcanoes. Dams are better built now, but they will never be completely safe.
China’s Banqiao dam, on the Ru River, is a tragic demonstration of what I mean. Built in the 1950s to generate electricity but with flood control as its main objective — severe floods had occurred in the basin several times in the 1940s and 1950s — the dam was supposed to be “over-engineered” for safety: it would withstand one-in-a-thousand-year rainfalls, over three hundred millimetres a day. Alas, in 1975, Typhoon Nina collided with a cold front and dumped more than a year’s rainfall in less than a day. At one point, the rain was coming down in solid sheets, 189 millimetres an hour, over 1,000 in a single day and more than three times the extraordinary event the dam was built to withstand. When the wall finally burst, it sent 500 million cubic metres of water plunging down the river. All in all, sixty-two dams burst in sequence, and a massive wave ten kilometres wide and more than six metres high with fifteen billion tonnes of water behind it roared down the valley at sixty kilometres an hour. An area fifty-five kilometres long and fifteen wide was completely wiped clear of living creatures, vegetation, and buildings. A new lake of 212,000 square kilometres appeared overnight. Seven county seats were inundated. Some 26,000 people died immediately, and another 145,000 in the days to follow. Nearly six million buildings collapsed. Eleven million residents were affected. Chinese government reports acknowledge that this wasn’t the only dam failure that catastrophic summer. Altogether, dam collapses killed a quarter of a million people and brought famine and disease to more than eleven million others.16
Other problems with dams are waterlogging and salinity of surrounding water tables (caused mostly, it is true, by the increased irrigation that dams encourage and not by the dams directly), the destruction of downstream fisheries by the blockage of nutrients (though in some cases, a new and sustainable fishery has been created by dams, such as Lake Kariba), and greenhouse gas emissions, mostly methane, caused by the submerged rotting vegetation. There have been claims, widely disputed, that gross emissions from reservoirs cause “almost a quarter of human-caused methane emissions and up to 4 percent of global warming.” This sounds alarming, except that human-caused methane emissions are dwarfed by natural ones. In any case, the “peer-reviewed study” from which these alarming estimates are drawn was actually making a different case altogether: that the technologies exist for capturing “dam emissions” and turning them into energy-producing fuel — dams could be an energy source, not a villain.17
As the World Commission on Dams report itself said, “The key decisions are not about dams as such, but about options for water and energy development. They relate directly to one of the greatest challenges facing the world in this new century — the need to rethink the management of freshwater resources . . . large dams [have] emerged as one of the most significant and visible tools for the management of water resources.”
Sometimes, and in some places, it makes sense to decommission dams, to tear them down and let the rivers run free. Perhaps they have outlived their usefulness. Perhaps they have silted up. Perhaps the fisheries they are blocking have more economic value than whatever benefits the dams still’ hold. Perhaps they are vulnerable to earthquakes, such as California’s thirty-two-metre San Clemente dam on the Carmel River, demolished in 2014. Perhaps they just weren’t very well built or would be too expensive to bring up to more rigorous modern safety standards. In the United States, about a thousand dams, most of them lower than five metres but some much larger, have been removed in the last century, including ninety-six in the Pacific Northwest. Two are in Washington State, the sixty-four-metre Glines Canyon dam, on Washington’s Elwha River, and the thirty-eight-metre Condit dam on the White Salmon River. All these are what Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the high-end sports clothing empire Patagonia and an anti-dam documentarist (DamNation), calls “deadbeat dams.”
Large Dams a-Building Still
Despite opposition, mega-dams are still being built. Take Brazil. First under the populist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and more recently under Dilma Rousseff, Brazil has so far proved impervious to vociferous outsider criticism, especially with two massive new hydroelectric schemes in the Amazon basin, the Jirau and Santo Antonio dams on the Madeira River, erected at a cost of $15 billion. These and other dams in the region (at least two more are planned) are central to the country’s Growth Acceleration Program, which aims to stimulate growth through huge investments in infrastructure, especially roads and hydroelectric dams. Brazil is doing much of the financing itself, though the World Bank is participating; construction is being done through a consortium of private and state-owned companies.
The downsides of this binge of dam building are mostly obvious, though some effects, such as flooding in Bolivia due to the Jirau backwater, were less so. Migrating fish remain a concern (the region is heavily dependent on the giant catfish for its food supply, and their migrations would be fatally disturbed). Malaria, already endemic in the region, will likely become worse. Nor were the local people consulted, or at least not very much — many are hard to reach, and some remain “uncontacted.” Two national elections have been held since the project was announced, and the dam-building party won both times. The only thing slowing down the building binge is the slowing down of Brazil’s economy itself — by 2013, the country had fallen into a difficult recession.
India is another energetic dam builder. In 2003, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee launched one of the world’s most ambitious energy plans, demanding that the country build no fewer than 162 big hydropower dams by 2025, later amplified to 292. The new projects would generate better than fifty thousand megawatts, half as much again as the country produced from all sources to that point. Almost all the projects would be built in the five northerly Himalayan states — not so surprising when you consider that steep mountain valleys give a fine head of water for electricity generation, and that dozens of rivers rise there, many of them merging to become the mighty Brahmaputra in eastern India. More than 30 of the dams would be built in one state alone, Uttarakhand, which shares borders with China and Nepal. Some rivers would have half a dozen dams spaced no more than ten kilometres apart.
However, in 2013, in a year of the most intense monsoon season ever recorded, flooding swept down the mountains, killing between six thousand and thirty thousand people (the figures are disputed), destroying tens of villages, carrying away almost a thousand kilometres of roads, destroying twenty or so small hydro projects, and seriously damaging ten large ones. Two months after the flooding ended, India’s Supreme Court essentially shut down further dam building, pending further analysis and “scientific study.” The International Rivers people were exultant: “It shows that nature will strike back if we disregard the ecological limits of fragile regions like the Himalayas through reckless dam building and other infrastructure development. We can only expect such disasters to happen more frequently under a changing climate.”18 Alas, one consequence is that India will have to rely more on burning coal to generate the power it needs.
Nepal uses less than 1 percent of its hydro potential, but that is about to change in a big way, despite the disastrous earthquake of 2014. A cluster of Indian dam builders, among them the giant GMR, are building (or planning) a series of multi-billion-dollar projects that would, if all were completed as planned, plausibly earn Nepal $17 billion over twenty years — this is a country whose GDP in 2014 was $19 billion. Much of the electricity these dams would generate would be exported to India. Indian engineers have suggested that if all Nepal’s rivers were thus tapped, they could produce somewhere around forty gigawatts of power, almost a fifth of India’s current capacity.
China is still the behemoth of dam builders. In addition to its inventory of nearly nineteen thousand large dams, China’s energy plan in 2013 projected the construction of another forty or so that would have twice the hydropower of the United States.19 Five of Asia’s greatest rivers — the Red, the Yangtze, the Irrawaddy, the Salween (called the Nu in China), and the Mekong — start within a few hundred kilometres of each other on the Tibetan Plateau, and China is planning hydro dams on all of them, even the pristine Nu, which flows through a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Yunnan Province, cited as one of the world’s most ecologically diverse and fragile places. More than sixty thousand people are likely to be displaced by the Nu dams. Pleas were ignored from, among others, Thailand and Myanmar, both of which depend on the Salween for basic subsistence. China never did sign a 1997 UN water-sharing treaty that would have mandated consultation with affected neighbours, in this case, India, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and Russia. And it is planning a dozen dams on the Mekong (called Lancang in China) that flows for forty-four hundred kilometres through six countries — China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam — to the South China Sea, scooping in a population of more than sixty-five million.
Protests from downriver may just be a case of the kettle calling the pot black. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand are all building, or have announced plans that they will be building, dams across the lower Mekong. At least nine new dams would be in Laos. There is an uproar in the making between dam builders, mostly Chinese and Malaysian companies, and the lower Mekong fishing industry that generates over $4 billion a year. A review by the multinational Mekong River Commission in 2010 asserted that the new Mekong reservoirs would reduce the value of the fishery by half a billion a year, put a hundred fish species at risk, mean the relocation of more than a hundred thousand people, and seriously damage the productive riverbank farming. Only about a quarter of the river’s flow would any longer get to the sea, threatening the Mekong Delta and Vietnam’s rice paddies.
It is possible to be pro-dam, even if cautiously. But damming the Mekong to provide less than 10 percent of the region’s projected electricity demand, set against the consequences outlined above, seems unnecessarily perverse.
And then there is the Congo River dam, an improbable plan to build in an improbable place at improbable cost the greatest hydroelectric project on the planet — more than double the output of China’s Three Gorges system, capable (if ever built) of providing enough electricity to supply half of sub-Saharan Africa with reliable power. And yet it might get done. The World Bank has approved a $73.1 million grant — trivial enough, given the project’s estimated $80 billion-plus cost, but, together with the African Development Bank’s similar grant, a significant marker of feasibility. Enough to get the legal framework in place, in any event.
In 1999, I had spent some time in Brazzaville and Kinshasa, twin Congo capitals on either other side of the river. My notes, later collected into a book, had this to say: “I sat for a while on a rock, staring at the Congo River rapids southwest of the Zairian capital, Kinshasa, watching islands of hyacinths come down from the deep interior of tropical Africa dashing themselves to pieces on the glistening boulders, a strange and exotic sight. . . . The water had begun more than four thousand kilometres away, near Lubumbashi in Shaba Province, almost on the continental divide, then drifted placidly through Kisangani in Haute Zaire, where the rebels had started their 1997 drive to wrest Zaire [as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was then called] from its aging and ailing dictator. A long and leisurely journey it was; only here, at the rapids, did the river seem in any hurry.” The Congo is unusual. Most river rapids are upstream. Congo is unique in that only near the mouth does it drop suddenly, a total of thirty-five metres in a series of small falls and rapids. “This was one of the world’s longest rivers, with the third greatest flow, after the Amazon and the Ganges. Every second, between 30,000 cubic metres (July) and 55,000 (December) pass by any one spot. If these Congo rapids were channelled and electrified, someone had calculated, they could supply about a sixth of the world’s hydroelectric power. Seso Seko Mobutu, Zaire’s unlamented late dictator, had had, in fact, a typically grandiose scheme to provide power for most of Africa by doing precisely that.”20
In fact, Mobutu, when he wasn’t siphoning off money to stash in France, had caused to be built two smaller prototypes, Inga I, in 1972, and Inga II, a decade later. They were built largely to supply energy to nearby aluminum mining and smelting operations. Together, they are supposed to produce around two thousand megawatts, a very long way from the more than forty thousand projected for Inga III, or Grand Inga (some plans say as much as a hundred thousand megawatts). Even so, their actual output is less than a quarter of capacity — graft has “misplaced” much of the money and materials for maintenance, and the people displaced are still waiting for compensation three decades later. This is not atypical. Any construction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a locus for corruption, grotesquely low-balled cost estimates, and wildly optimistic completion deadlines. So when you read that construction is likely to start in 2016 and to be completed in 2020, you would be wise to express a little skepticism.
Still, there are serious partners involved. Grand Inga is financed by a public-private partnership and is listed as one of the G20’s top ten “exemplary transformational projects.” The European Investment Bank has chipped in. Other partners include the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the Southern African Development Community, and Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned electrical utility, the largest in Africa, which will provide technical expertise along with France’s utility, EDF. In exchange, South Africa, which has a serious supply shortage, has a deal with Congo to get the first twenty-five hundred megawatts of stage one’s forty-eight hundred. Three contractors will share the load: Chinese, Spanish, and Canadian-Korean. Hydro Québec was involved in early stages but subsequently dropped out.
The plan is for Grand Inga to be constructed in six phases, with Inga III only the first. Inga III won’t close the river but divert part of it to an adjacent valley that runs parallel to the main stream. Later stages will completely flood the Bundi Valley for a twenty-two-thousand-hectare reservoir that will displace large numbers of people and provide a new home for even more billions of noxious dengue fever–carrying mosquitoes and parasites. It is unlikely that the displaced will receive much in the way of benefit or compensation. None of the plans envisage bringing electricity to many of the Congolese people, except those in Kinshasa itself. And ecologists are worried about the loss of the famous Congo plume and its effects on local, regional, and perhaps even the global climate. The feasibility studies that have taken place are all about cost and construction; the environment has received only glancing attention. Environmental opponents have been reduced to hoping that corruption and escalating costs will mean the thing never gets built.
The International Rivers network has pleaded for rethinking. Yet they themselves are beating the same tired old drum: “G-20 leaders should prioritize investments that directly address poor peoples’ needs rather than using taxpayer money to pay for huge, high-risk projects whose private sector returns rarely trickle down. In sub-Saharan Africa, where water stress is highest, decentralized infrastructure has a better track record of providing water and electricity than do large storage dams, which can worsen poverty and reduce climate resilience, and are certainly not green.”21 That from Zachary Hurwitz, policy coordinator of International Rivers. There was no sign anyone was listening.