Sólidos suspendidos a. Distribución espacial

The World Commission on Dams (WCD) began work in 1998 and released its report in November 2000. The Commission arrived at five key points about which “there can no longer be any justifiable doubt” (WCD 2000):

1) Dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development, and the benefits from them have been considerable

2) In too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure those benefits

3) Lack of equity in the distribution of benefits has called into question the value of many dams

4) By bringing together to the table all those whose rights are involved and who bear the risks associated with different options for water and energy resources development, the conditions for a positive resolution of competing interests and conflicts are created

56 _{The OED reports directly to the Bank‟s Board, and is thus independent of the Bank‟s operational departments.}

89 5) Negotiating outcomes will greatly improve the development effectiveness of water and energy projects by eliminating unfavourable projects at an early stage, and by offering as a choice only those options that key stakeholders agree represent the best ones to meet the needs in question.

The Commission proposed a framework for decision-making based on five core values: equity, sustainability, efficiency, participatory decision-making and accountability. They reviewed in detail eight case studies of large dams and the country cases of India and China, surveyed 125 large dams, and did 17 thematic reviews. The resulting knowledge base showed that a considerable portion of dams fall short of physical and economic targets, and has had a “marked tendency towards schedule delays and significant cost overruns” (WCD 2000:14). On the positive side, many dams continue to generate benefits even after 30-40 years of operation.

Regarding the environment, the WCD found that large dams have led to the frequently irreversible loss of forests, wildlife habitats, and aquatic biodiversity, and that the ecosystem impacts are more negative than positive. Like natural lakes, reservoirs emit greenhouse gases, but the scale is highly variable and more studies are needed to determine the impacts of dams on global warming.

The negative impact of dams on humans has frequently been neither adequately assessed nor accounted for. Forty to eighty million people have been displaced by dams worldwide, and people living downstream have suffered from loss of livelihoods. The social and environmental costs of large dams are borne disproportionately by the poor and other vulnerable groups, and the WCD emphasised that this makes the „balance-sheet‟ approach to the adding up of costs and benefits unacceptable on equity grounds. The commission proposed a set of guidelines for the decision-making process of proposed dam projects based on a “rights-and-risk approach”. By this, they mean that rights, in particular basic human rights, should be the fundamental reference point in any debate on dams, and that all projects should be subject to an assessment of the risks of not only developers/investors but also of the involuntary risk bearers related to the project (WCD 2000).

90 The anti-dam movement welcomed the report of the World Commission on Dams, as it corroborated many of the claims that the movement had forwarded for more than a decade. However, the WCD Report did not conclude that large dams are inherently destructive and are symptoms of a failed and inherently unjust model of development. Medha Patkar, who was a member of the commission, therefore demanded that a comment from her was attached to the report before she signed it. In this, she argues that “some fundamental issues” are missing from the report, and that these have to be addressed “to reach an adequate analysis of the basic systemic changes needed to achieve equitable and sustainable development and to give a pointer towards challenging the forces that lead to the marginalisation of a majority through the imposition of unjust technologies like large dams” (Patkar 2000:321).

McCully has included a chapter on the World Commission on Dams in the updated edition of “Silenced Rivers”. The report as a whole vindicates the arguments of dam opponents, he says, even though there are plenty of political compromises in the report for them to criticize. His comments illustrate the difficulty of getting research findings accepted as “neutral facts” in a political setting with competing interests and values. For example, McCully casts doubt on the reliability of the studies that find no significant emission of greenhouse gases from reservoirs57. McCully argues that there is a pattern in the scientific disagreement, where the scientists who claim that reservoir emissions are lower than those from thermal power are “largely funded by Hydro-Quebec and Brazilian hydropower interests”, whereas those warning against large emissions are “affiliated to various universities and research institutes” (McCully 2001:xxxii), indicating what he sees as the greater reliability of the warnings of reservoirs being part of the problem rather than the solution to global warming. The preparation of the India Country Study for the WCD similarly illustrates the politically charged nature of the “science” of dams and the problems of arriving at any kind of widely acceptable “scientific” conclusions about whether dams are beneficial or not, and the introduction to the study speaks for itself on this issue:

57 _{About this, the WCD writes: “However, the quantity of each GHG emitted, their spatial and temporal}

distribution, whether they exceed background levels and the methods to measure these variables are all topics of debate among the few experts in the field. This means that the argument is not about seeking alternatives that emit zero GHGs, but to opt for those with significantly lower GHG emissions on a life cycle basis” (WCD Secretariat 2000:vii).

91 “It became clear at an early stage that for various reasons this could not be a joint report of the group as a whole, but would have to be a collection of papers by the different members on various aspects. (...) The authors are not necessarily in agreement with everything that is said in papers other than their own.” (Rangachari, Sengupta et al. 2000:1)

The team, however, did write a joint concluding chapter of 14 pages with more or less the same conclusion as the WCD itself: that large dams in India do have beneficial impacts, but that these have largely been overestimated, and that the costs and damages have been underestimated and unaccounted for in the planning process of past projects.