Social and Environmental Standards

Dams generate electricity, irrigate farm land and control floods. Dams also degrade ecosystems, displace communities, flood productive forests and farmland, and create unsustainable debt burdens. Strict social and environmental standards are needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, to identify water and energy projects that best address the needs of society, the environment, and the economy.

International Rivers has for decades worked to strengthen social and environmental standards for the World Bank and other financial institutions. We promote effective standards for new dam financiers from China and other countries, and defend existing standards against a backlash from the dam industry.

The World Commission on Dams

The most comprehensive guidelines for water and energy projects were created by the World Commission on Dams (WCD) in 2000. The WCD assessed the development effectiveness of dams in an independent, participatory process, and established an innovative framework for decision-making.

The WCD framework covers key aspects of dam planning and construction, including the need to fully assess all available options for meeting water and energy needs, gaining public acceptance, protecting healthy rivers, and addressing outstanding issues of existing dams before building new ones.

The Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol (HSAP)

The dam industry has never embraced the WCD’s innovative approach.  The International Hydropower Association in 2007 created the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Forum (HSAF) to come up with a new approach. The goal of this forum was to develop industry-led sustainability guidelines.  The Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol (HSAP) was launched in 2011, with no buy-in from dam-affected people or civil society from the Global South.  

The HSAP is a set of guidelines that do not benchmark practices against any minimum standards for dam building.  If widely adopted, such guidelines would seriously undermine the existing standards for water and energy projects.

LATEST ADDITIONS:

World Bank's Program-For-Results Loan Instrument: Good Intentions?

Hydroelectric power: Spate of dam building meets resistance

Belo Monte Dam Does Not Meet Equator Principles, Say Rights Groups

Chinese Hydropower Scorecard Doesn't Fill the Accountability Gap

Hydropower Industry Needs Standards, not Scorecards, to be Sustainable

CONTACT US:

Peter Bosshard
peter [at] internationalrivers [dot] org
+1 510 848 1155

Zachary Hurwitz
zachary [at] internationalrivers [dot] org
+1 510-848-1155