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In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega dams (2024)

Despite continued opposition, the World Bank has approved the first of five big dam projects expected to get its support in the coming months. Climate change has upped the need for renewable energy, but the environmental and social costs of building such massive projects remain.

These include dams’ enormous upfront costs followed by waits of as long as a decade or more before electricity revenues begin flowing; their destruction of fisheries and riverine ecosystems; their displacement of a conservatively estimated 80 million ⁠ people around the world and their damage to the livelihoods of a half-billion more; their substantial emissions of methane from some reservoirs; their steep reductions in energy production when drought — which is increasingly common due to climate change — empties reservoirs, as is currently happening in southern Africa and elsewhere; and the seeming coup de grace, their declining competitiveness with increasingly less costly wind and solar installations. The catch is that the water that will turn the Rogun power plant’s turbines in the winter will be impounded from the Vakhsh River during the summer, which means it will no longer reach farmers and others who depend on it downstream in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, according to Simonov. Of Inga 3’s enormous projected output of up to 11,000 ⁠ megawatts, 5,000 would be exported to South Africa (after the construction of transmission lines costing another $4 billion); 3,000 would be routed to mining companies in the DRC’s Katanga province 1,700 miles away; and the rest would be used to improve electricity reliability ⁠ in Kinshasa, the nation’s capital.

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