There are more than 45,000 large dams around the world, which, overall, have played a role in helping communities and economies manage water resources for food production, energy generation, flood alleviation, and domestic and industrial use. Current estimates suggest that some 30 to 40 percent of irrigated land worldwide now relies on dams and large dams are estimated to support 12 to 16 percent of global food production. Hydropower projects generate 19 percent of world electricity and account for over 50 percent of electricity generated in 63 countries. These are considerable contributions.

However, the projects in the Commission's knowledge base showed a high degree of variability in meeting predicted water and electricity services and related social benefits. A considerable portion fell short of projected physical and economic targets, while many continued to generate benefits beyond their projected economic life. Extensive impacts on ecosystems were evident including the loss of habitats, species, and aquatic biodiversity. In many cases, the measures explicitly designed to mitigate such impacts proved ineffective.

Those who bear the social and environmental costs and risks of large dams-especially the poor, the vulnerable, and future generations-are often those that receive neither the water and electricity services nor the social and economic benefits from them. An estimated 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by dam projects. Although some compensation was invariably provided, the Commission found that the full range of social impacts was frequently neither accounted for nor addressed. In particular, the impacts on the lives, livelihoods, and health of the affected communities upstream and downstream of the projects were not considered, and distribution of benefits was extremely inequitable. This gave rise to growing opposition to dams by affected communities worldwide. While dams have delivered many benefits, in too many cases the price paid to secure those benefits has been too high and could have been avoided. Applying a "balance-sheet" approach to assess the costs and benefits of large dams is seen as unacceptable, given existing commitments to human rights and sustainable development.

In proposing a way forward beyond the prevailing conflicts, the Commission provides a new framework for decisionmaking based on recognizing the rights of and assessing the risks to all stakeholders. Clarifying the rights context for a proposed project is an essential step in identifying those with legitimate claims and entitlements. The notion of risks is an important dimension to understanding how, and to what extent, a project may have an impact on such rights. The rights-and-risks approach introduces a departure from a balance-sheet approach, where the loss to those adversely affected has been traded off against the gain to the intended beneficiaries. It encompasses the concepts that those adversely affected should participate in the planning process and have a share in project benefits.

Seven strategic priorities and corresponding policy principles for water and energy resource development are proposed that build on the rights-and-risks approach. They can be summarized as follows:

1. Gaining public acceptance by recognizing rights, addressing risks, and safeguarding the entitlements of all affected people, particularly indigenous and tribal peoples, women, and other vulnerable groups. Decisionmaking processes should enable informed participation by all groups.
2. Undertaking comprehensive options assessment based on clearly defined needs for water, food, and energy, and giving social and environmental aspects the same significance as economic and financial factors.
3. Addressing existing dams to optimize benefits by changing water use priorities, physical and land use in the river basin, and by developing technological changes in environmental, safety, economic, and technical regulations. Outstanding social issues and environmental mitigation and restoration measures should be addressed.
4. Sustaining rivers and livelihoods through understanding, protecting, and restoring ecosystems at river-basin level, avoiding negative impacts, prioritizing good site selection and project design, and releasing tailor-made environmental flows to help maintain downstream ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
5. Recognizing entitlements and sharing benefits through joint negotiations with adversely affected people that result in mutually agreed-upon and legally enforceable resettlement, mitigation, and development provisions that improve livelihoods and quality of life.
6. Ensuring compliance with commitments made by governments, developers, regulators, and operators in the planning, implementation, and operation of dams. Regulatory and compliance frameworks use incentives and sanctions to ensure effectiveness where flexibility is needed to accommodate changing circumstances.
7. Sharing rivers for peace, development and security, especially with regard to transboundary rivers, so that the use and management of resources increasingly becomes the subject of agreement between states to promote mutual self-interest for regional cooperation and peaceful collaboration. The focus shifts to sharing benefits. External financing agencies support the principles of good faith negotiations between riparian states.

The Commission offers practical advice for implementing these priorities: a set of criteria for five key decision points in the planning and project cycles along with 26 advisory guidelines based on examples of good practice from around the world. Some examples of the advisory guidelines include: using multi-criteria analysis in options assessment to raise the significance of social and environmental concerns; conducting a distribution analysis to determine how costs and benefits of any option are shared; and developing mechanisms that provide incentives to promote greater compliance with commitments. In the long run, the Commission's report offers the opportunity to reduce conflict, delays, and overall costs to the dam operator, the government, and to society in general.

For further information see IUCN. Vision for Water and Nature: A World Strategy for Conservation and Sustainable Management of Water Resources in the 21st Century. Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, U.K: IUCN, 2000.; Van Hofwegen, P. and M. Svendsen. A Vision for Food and Rural Development. Delft: Institute for Hydraulic Studies (IHE), 2000.; World Commission on Dams. Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making. London: Earthscan, 2000. Source: World Commission on Dams, 2000.

This brief is based on excerpts from the World Commission on Dams report, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making. However, responsibility for the brief rests with the authors alone.

Jeremy Bird (jbird@dams.org) is a senior adviser and Pamela Wallace (info@dams.org) is a research fellow at the World Commission on Dams Secretariat, Capetown, South Africa.