BIG DAMS are back in the news. Press cameras are infatuated with the Three Gorges monster in China and, as Fred Pearce laments, governments and the World Bank “are back in love with dams” (New Scientist, 22 March, p 29).
Such megaprojects spell disaster for people who lack clean water, Pearce contends. And the management of water is an issue of ever-increasing importance to the world, especially for its poorest inhabitants.
In the mid-1990s the World Bank stopped funding big dams, and created the highly critical World Commission on Dams (WCD). But now the pressure is on for a…
