As Global Desertification Hits Its Stride, World Bank Reverses Itself, Returns To Financing Mega-Dams
After a decade of declining to finance large hydroelectric dams, the World Bank is getting back into the business in a big way. Throughout the last half of the 20th century, the bank was the world’s leading supporter of big hydro. But over the last two decades, it followed a zigzag pattern as dam supporters and critics inside the institution took turns determining hydro policy. During the last 10 years, the critics — disturbed by big dams’ huge social and environmental costs and their long construction timelines — seemed to dominate, and the bank supported only one new big hydro project.
But earlier this week the bank’s board of directors approved a scheme to make the bank the lead financier in a $6.3 billion project to finish construction of the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan. The frequently stalled project, launched in 1976, is now about 30 percent complete. If fully built, it would become both the world’s tallest dam, at 1,100 feet, and with its total price tag of $11 billion, one of the world’s most expensive.
The World Bank and Democratic Republic of Congo officials also have been negotiating the terms of a deal that would include financing Inga 3, the third of eight proposed dams in a megaproject known as Grand Inga. Jaw-dropping in scale, Grand Inga is a $100-billion venture that would be the world’s largest dam scheme, nearly doubling the power output of China’s Three Gorges, currently the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, and potentially bringing electricity to a sizable chunk of the African continent. It would also reconfigure the hydrology of the world’s second-most-powerful river, the Congo, in what opponents consider environmentally harmful ways.
In addition, last April the bank “agreed in principle” to lead a consortium of international and regional banks financing a $1.1 billion dam, one of Nepal’s biggest, on the Arun River. Called the Upper Arun, the dam is backed by Indian companies, and its electricity is intended for export to India. But Nepal is already sated with hydroelectricity, and as My Republica, a Kathmandu newspaper, reported in October, it has for several years been wasting massive amounts of produced electricity because of the inadequacy of its transmission lines. The Upper Arun dam is also being built in a region that’s highly vulnerable to earthquakes and to floods caused by the bursting of ice dams on glacial lakes.
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https://e360.yale.edu/features/world-bank-hydro-dams