"A Dam Revival, Despite Risks"

"While some dams in the United States and Europe are being decommissioned, a dam-building boom is underway in developing countries. It is a shift from the 1990s, when amid concerns about environmental impacts and displaced people, multilateral lenders like the World Bank backed away from large hydroelectric power projects.

World hydropower production will grow from 4,000 terawatt hours now — about the annual power output of the United States — to 4,670 terawatt hours in 2020, according to Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, in Paris. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that hydropower generation will double in China between 2008 and 2035, and triple in India and Africa.

The World Bank and other international lenders were the most important financiers of large dams before the ’90s lull. But although the World Bank has in recent years increased its investment in hydropower from a low of just a few million dollars in 1999 to about $1.8 billion in 2014, it still funds only 2 percent of hydropower project investment today."

Erica Gies reports for the New York Times.