World Bank flayed for "inadequate" study on dams
A diverse group of activists is asking the World Bank to suspend support for large dams around the world and to conduct an independent review of its efforts in the field, alleging an earlier report depended on early estimates of costs and returns rather than what actually happened.
The campaigners, including teachers from Argentina, hydro-engineers from Nepal, and Brazilians affected by dams, want the bank to stop what they allege is an effort to mislead the public on the merits of 50 large dams built with bank loans.
Writing on Monday to World Bank president James Wolfensohn, 49 non-governmental organisations from 21 countries rejected as "incomplete and inadequate" the conclusions of a recent internal study in which the bank declares that the dams's economic benefits -- chiefly, electric power and irrigation -- outweigh their environmental and social costs.
The main problem with the study, prepared last August by the bank's Operations Evaluation Division, is that it works with the bank's projections of likely costs and benefits of large dams, not on what actually happened, critics say.
The NGOs’s protest comes just days before the bank is to sit down with critics to discuss large dams. The bank itself joined with the World Conservation Union, an NGO also known as the IUCN, to organise the workshop starting April 10 in Switzerland.
Bank sources say the workshop is an effort to design a follow-up study to the OED review, which was intended only as a 'desk study' of data already available. The new study will try to collect new data and include opinions in favour of and against dams.
The California-based International Rivers Network, which has obtained a copy of the bank's internal study, plans to use the workshop to unveil a detailed critique of the document.
The OED study "does not compare projected with actual costs and benefits for any of the 50 dams reviewed," the IRN critique states. Thus, the study is based on assumptions, for example, about dam operating and maintenance costs the demand and supply of electricity and environmental impacts at the dam sites and downstream.
In many cases, the study "has exaggerated both the actual amount of power generated and the economic value of each unit of power produced," says the IRN, alleging that the OED report includes power generated by dams downstream of the ones being studied, but ignores the costs of those dams.
For dams meant to provide irrigation as well as electricity, "the OED has exaggerated both the areas of cropland receiving irrigation water and the yields from the irrigated areas," according to the IRN.
The bank's internal evaluators say reservoir fisheries can compensate for the loss of wild fisheries after a dam is built, but they provide "no figures on predicted and actual yields from reservoir fisheries", the group adds.
The 67-page OED report has not been made public. Rather, the bank last year released a four-page "OED precis" which, in the IRN's view, forms "the apex of a process of incremental censorship". The group wants the summary withdrawn from circulation, saying it misleads the public.
"Negative comments on dam performance in the background document to the OED report are cut or weakened in the main report, and then emasculated further in the ‘precis’," IRN states.
For example, the OED report readily admits that "most information collected does not meet satisfactory standards of accuracy or reliability," and that this "makes it difficult to arrive at a definitive evaluation."
Nevertheless, the report's executive summary states that "13 of the projects in the review... can be regarded as acceptable, 24 as potentially acceptable, and 13 as unacceptable", and that this "suggests that, overall, most large dams were justified".
The publicly available "precis", however, states that, "in most of the cases reviewed, benefits have far outweighed costs". It adds that "these results suggest that the bank should continue supporting the development of large dams".
"Nowhere does the "precis"... mention the limited and poor quality data on which this important conclusion is based," said the IRN critique, to be released April 11, the second day of the workshop.
Although OED sources here have yet to see the critique, they voice "considerable sympathy" with some criticisms of the bank. They note, however, that most dams studied were approved between 1956 and 1984, many before the bank's current environmental policies were written.
As such, many of the projects -- and the internally available data on them –"don't reflect modern thinking," says one official.
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