World Commission on Dams

The World Dam Commission ( World Commission on Dams, WCD) was an independent international commission to investigate the benefits and harms of large dams and all related matters.

It was developed by the World Bank and the IUCN ( World Conservation Union ) was established in 1998 to meet the growing opposition to large dams and had 12 members from diverse institutions. Leader was Professor Kader Asmal, Secretary-General Achim Steiner, the other members Lakshmi Chand Jain, Judy Henderson, Göran Lindahl, Thayer Scudder, Joji Cariño, Donald Blackmore, Medha Patkar, José Goldemberg, Deborah Moore and Jan Veltrop.

Your order was:

• To consider the benefits of large dams and to identify alternatives for water and energy supply, and
• To develop internationally accepted criteria as guidelines for the planning, design, evaluation, construction, operation, monitoring and decommissioning of dams.

The Commission concluded its work with a report, which was issued on 16 November 2000 and then broke up.

The WCD found that dams have contributed an important contribution to human development and have great benefits that these benefits had but often also causes significant costs and disadvantages, especially in social terms and for the environment. Many projects had not brought so much benefit to the water supply and energy as you had promised them.

The WCD has thus found not only benefits, but also a number of disadvantages of dams. That is why the report was welcomed by the dam proponents not only on consent and sparked extensive debate.