This document provides an overview of dams, their history, impacts and the challenges of planning and assessing them. It discusses how dams were used historically for national development but often had under-estimated costs and over-estimated benefits. It describes past efforts to improve dam planning like the World Commission on Dams and challenges they faced. It outlines the research questions and cross-disciplinary approach of the FutureDams project to help design dams that maximize benefits and minimize conflicts over their social and environmental impacts.

1. Building Better Dams: the Past,
Present and Future of Dams
Professor David Hulme
Global Development Institute
University of Manchester
www.futuredams.org
www.gdi.manchester.ac.uk
www.mace.manchester.ac.uk

2. • Confession – Not an expert on dams or water management
• Resettlement and the social impacts of development projects
…and lots of help from Bill Adams at Cambridge
• But, I do get fired up about dams – especially when rich
Westerners stop people in poorer countries from having
dams… Nepal!
• Interdisciplinary
• Systems engineers,
Social scientists,
Economists,
Hydrologists and more

3. Dam problems!
Bakalori Dam (Nigeria)
• Construction costs: under-estimated
• Yields: productivity of existing rainfed farming under-estimated,
and predicted yields from irrigated fields over-estimated
• Economic returns:
• predicted value of cash crops assumed commercial processing
available (tomato canning: factory not planned or built)
• Minimal assessment of major downstream impacts-public health

4. FutureDams: How to design dams that
don’t have more costs than benefits
(growth, jobs, social progress,
sustainability, environment)

5. Dams and national development:
Egypt and the Nile Basin
• Economic growth, flood control, irrigation,
electricity, urbanisation, “modernisation”
• Cairo barrages 1843 and 1891
• Aswan Dam 1902 - heightened 1912 & 1934
• 1937 Nile Waters Agreement (94% Egypt)
• Aswan High Dam (1960s)
• 1999 Nile Basin Initiative - NBI (all of the
basin’s countries…except Egypt now)

6. US national
development and
river basin planning
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
1930s Depression: Federal corporation created in 1933
‘…to improve the navigability and to provide for the flood
control of the Tennessee River; to provide for reforestation
and the proper use of marginal lands in the Tennessee
Valley; to provide for the agricultural and industrial
development of said valley; to provide for the national
defense …and for other purposes’.

7. The TVA
• Land management:
o Soil erosion control, reforestation,
changed farming techniques
• River engineering:
o Channelling the Tennessee River,
dam construction
• Power generation
o Hydropower dams

8. The ‘TVA Model’ is exported
• Mekong Committee 1957
o Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam independence 1954
o UN Report 1957, Development of Water Resources in the
Lower Mekong Basin: 5 dams, 90,000km2 irrigation, 13.7 GW
• US Bureau of Reclamation study 1956 and report 1962
o 1976 Indicative Basin Plan
• Interim Mekong Committee 1978 (no Cambodia).
o 1987 Revised Indicative Basin Plan
• Mekong River Commission 1995

9. River basin development in Africa
• 1960s
o Volta River Authority (1961)
o Niger Delta Development Board
(1961)
o Niger River Commission (1964)
• 1970s
o Organisation pour la Mise en
Value du Fleuve Senegal OMVS
(Senegal Basin) 1972
o Tana and Athi Rivers
Development Authority 1974
(Kenya)
• 1980s RBDAs across Nigeria UNEP: GRID Arendal

10. Dams for
development:
Africa 1960s and 1970s
• Volta: Akosombo
• Niger: Kainji, Jebba, Lokoja
• Zambezi: Kariba, Cahorra Bassa,
• Senegal: Manantali, Diama
• Partly OECD foreign aid and big contracts
for OECD engineering companies

12. The benefits of dams
• Power generation
• Water supply
• Irrigation
• Flood control
• Navigation
• Pollution control
(debris, tailings…)
• Recreation

13. Other impacts of dams: upstream
• Reservoir resettlement
– Health, wellbeing, culture
• Resettlement livelihoods
– Fishing, farming,
• Reservoir sedimentation
– Catchment management
• Lake ecology
– Fisheries
– Eutrophication
thehigherlearning.com (photo Erin Conway-Smith)

14. Other impacts of dams: downstream
• Hydrology
– flood extent and timing, duration and
slope of the flood recession curve
• Water quality
– temperature, water clarity
• Channel changes
– erosion, channel stability, delta systems
• Ecological change
– aquatic ecosystems, fish, wetlands
• Socio-economic change
– fishing, agriculture, tourism…debt??
natureworldnews.com

16. Dams: good idea or bad idea?
• Preservation vs wise use debates
in USA in early 1900s
• President Theodore Roosevelt and
John Muir meet in Yosemite
National Park
• Massive dam building in USA
• Rise of US environmentalism

17. Dams: good idea or bad idea?
• Successful anti-dam campaign on the
Colorado River in 1940s&1950s by Sierra
Club, Wilderness Society & Readers
Digest
• A deal reached: Glen
Canyon Dam is built - but
not other dams
Airphonona.com

18. The end of dams?
• Dam removal has accelerated in the USA

19. The end of dams?
• 1994 Manibeli Declaration - calls for
moratorium on all World Bank funding for
large dams
• The World Bank’s Social and Environmental
Assessment of Dams project discourages dam
proposals – “safeguards”
• But China, India, Turkey and other G77
countries want to build dams
• What to do..?

20. World Commission on Dams
• 1997 workshop in Switzerland
• International Union for the Conservation of
Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and
World Bank
• 35 delegates - ICOLD, NGOs, governments
• Recommended an international commission,
World Commission on Dams (WCD)
• 12 people and a technical secretariat
based in Cape Town.

22. World Commission on Dams
• Final report Dams and
Development launched by
Nelson Mandela
November 2000.
• 7 Strategic Priorities for
dam construction
• 5 key criteria

23. The WCD’s seven strategic
priorities

24. WCD five key criteria
1. Needs assessment: validate needs
for water and energy services
2. Select alternatives: full range of
options – including “no dam”
3. Project preparation: all plans and
agreements in place
4. Project implementation: full
compliance
5. Project operation: adapt to
changing context – continued
participatory processes

25. But the WCD does not fix the problem
• The Report was not acceptable to developing
country governments
– ‘all unanimously agreed that the WCD Report was
biased and could not be accepted’ (Asik K. Biswas
2012 Impacts of Large Dams, p. xvii)
– Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Lao PDR, Nepal,
Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Vietnam
• Too negative about dams and anti-growth
• Too impractical: ‘multi stage negotiated
process too slow’
• Solutions too complex and bureaucratic
• The problems are too complex

26. Now a global boom in hydropower dam construction
Zarfl et al. (2015) Aquatic Sciences 17: 161-170

27. Source : International Energy Agency (2013), via Jamie Skinner
HEP 16% of global electricity generation
Global hydro-electric power production

28. Why is it so hard?
• Costs and benefits are complex
– multidisciplinary planning is hard
• Many impacts are remote from the dam
– Hard to analyze, mitigate, compensate
– Project boundaries narrow and pre-defined
– Finance and construction…and corruption
• Many impacts are delayed
– long term research and monitoring is expensive
– planning is done in a hurry
• River basins cross borders
– institutional/political issues are significant
• Dam impacts interact
– Complex and emergent issues (multi-purpose, generation or storage…)
– Getting more complex – carbon (900Kg CO2 per Kg cement), methane…

29. Methane
• Global reservoir Methane emissions
are significant
- Perhaps as much as from global rice
production or global biomass emissions
• GHG fluxes from reservoirs in future
IPCC budgets and other inventories of
anthropogenic emissions
• Difficult to measure – low intensity
but vast area
BioScience 66: 949–964.2016

30. Future Dams: Design and
Assessment of resilient and
sustainable interventions in water-
energy-food-environment
Mega-Systems
• New dams have the potential to
contribute to Sustainable
Development Goals.
• Poorly designed dams exacerbate
social and political instability,
environmental degradation, debt

31. Future Dams
research questions
1. What’s happening now?
– Who is selecting, designing, and financing dams and systems of dams today?
– What approaches/tools do they use?
– What shapes and incentivises decisions about dam selection & operation?
2. What should be improved?
– What technical and political knowledge is required for new dams to
maximise and appropriately allocate nexus benefits, promote resilient and
sustainable development, and minimise conflict and socio-ecological loss?
– What participatory decision processes need designing/improving?
3. How?
– What skills, approaches, processes, tools and networks will help create a
new generation of engineers, social scientists and policy analysts?

32. Whole system
thinking
• Holistic analysis
• Systems of
dams not single
projects
• Dams as WEFE
or nexus
interventions
• Operation as
well as
construction

33. Governance, politics
& international
relations
Finance,
charges,
compensation
debt
Ecosystem
services, hydro-
ecology,
climate change
Economic
analysis
Systems
engineering &
decision-making
under
uncertainty
Social impacts,
displacement,
gender, inequality
Design
and assessment of
dams as water-energy-
food-envt system
interventions
Cross-Disciplinarity

34. Academic challenges
• Cross-disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity, inter-
disciplinarity…but, disciplines are silos?
• Social science research for water management -
engineers, hydrologists, ecologists, economist
• Social science research on water management
-anthropologists, political scientists, geography
• Directly into ‘models’…directly by stakeholder or
participatory processes …indirectly, by public
debate?
• FutureDAMS – Approach=Manual and Model

35. ‘…it is one thing to find fault
with an existing system. It is
another thing altogether, a
more difficult task, to
replace it with an approach
that is better’.
(Nelson Mandela, at the
launch of Dams and
Development in London,
16 November 2000)

36. www.futuredams.org