How We Lost Our Best Opportunity to Ensure Safer Dams

When Nelson Mandela heralded the release of the World Commission on Dams final report in a London speech on November 16, 2000, he congratulated its authors for delivering a socially and environmentally sensitive blueprint for dam-building and for providing a model of respectful negotiation among the many groups with a stake in dams. "You have shown us the way forward for dealing with such complex issues," he said.

The accomplishment seemed outsized, for dams are magnets for conflict. How could they not be? Their reservoirs are the world's largest manmade things, shifting so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly changed the velocity of the earth's rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. On the one hand, they generate so much electricity and irrigated water for agriculture that economic development has seemed inconceivable without them. On the other, they have produced vast disarray, displacing or impoverishing hundreds of millions of people and inflicting permanent damage on most of the world's 200-plus major river ecosystems.

Now, with a decade's perspective, Mandela's speech seems to mark the end of a more hospitable era, dating from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center, during which international cooperation on human rights and environmental issues seemed feasible. A few weeks later, the Supreme Court declared George Bush the U.S. president, and 10 months after that, violent Muslim fundamentalists toppled the World Trade Center. Both events shunted environmental and human rights concerns to the sidelines, and may have doomed prospects for the report's acceptance all by themselves. Yet unlike most issuances of similar international bodies, a decade later the report has not been forgotten; still frequently cited, it hovers over recent dam developments like a whispered reproach.

The commission was born out of the World Bank's frustration in building dams. By the mid-1990s, the Bank funded only an average of four dams a year, down from six or seven times as many a decade earlier. The evidence of dams' social and environmental destructiveness had by then become well-known, and dam opponents found success in forcing delays of large projects until they ceased being viable.

In hopes of producing an agreement that would placate opponents and open the way for more dam construction, the Bank reluctantly agreed to support an international commission that would investigate dams' performance and make recommendations on how to build them. Negotiators representing all major constituents in dam disputes agreed on the selection of 12 commissioners who embodied the full spectrum of views about dams' value, from a dam engineer and the chief executive of the world's largest supplier of hydroelectric generators to the planet's foremost anti-dam activist.

The commissioners ended up confounding the many industry observers who thought they could never reach a consensus. Over a two-and-a-half year period, the commission presided over the world's first comprehensive study of large dams' impacts. While acknowledging dams' role in producing a fifth of the world's electricity and enabling as much as a sixth of world food production, the commission found that dams had a "marked tendency" toward schedule delays and cost overruns, that they "led to the irreversible loss of species and ecosystems," and that they had forced the resettlement of 40 to 80 million people, almost invariably to vastly inferior sites. The commission also agreed on 26 recommendations that would have dramatically limited dams' negative consequences, among other ways by eliminating many ill-advised ones and requiring the "free, prior, and informed consent" of indigenous people facing relocation.