World Bank U-turn brings hydropower in from cold
Organisation sees expansion of generating capacity as crucial to enabling development while cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions
The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower projects around the globe, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use.
Major hydropower projects in Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere - all of a scale dubbed "transformational" for the regions involved - are part of the bank's fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up steadily in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue amid a worldwide boom in water-fuelled electricity.
Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be so disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the bank is opening the taps for dams, transmission lines and related infrastructure as president Jim Yong Kim tries to resolve a dilemma he has placed at the core of bank strategy: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.
An influential voice among Kim's top staff members, vice-president for sustainable development Rachel Kyte, said: "Large hydro is a very big part of the solution for Africa and South Asia and Southeast Asia … I fundamentally believe we have to be involved." The earlier move out of hydro "was the wrong message … That was then. This is now. We are back."
Large hydro is a very big part of the solution for Africa and South Asia and Southeast Asia … I fundamentally believe we have to be involved
It is a controversial stand. The bank backed out of large-scale hydropower because of the steep trade-offs involved. Big dams produce lots of cheap, clean electricity, but they often uproot villages in dam-flooded areas and destroy the livelihoods of the people the institution is supposed to help.