Rich countries should not keep less developed ones poor by fashionable trends that oppose dams and water management infrastructure, a top World Bank water resources chief said on Monday.
SYDNEY — Rich countries should not keep less developed ones poor by fashionable trends that oppose dams and water management infrastructure, a top World Bank water resources chief said on Monday.
Australia, the driest inhabited country in the world, would not be the rich, developed country it is today if dams and water infrastructure had not been built, David Grey, senior water adviser at The World Bank, told Reuters in an interview.
Developed countries have been taking too broad a brush to dams and keeping poor countries poor in the process, he said.
"We're telling them (poor nations) not to do what we did in order to get rich ourselves," Grey said from Brisbane, where he had addressed the ninth annual International Riversymposium conference.
Grey said that the pendulum was swinging back toward greater acceptance of dams and water infrastructure as part of the overall management of water, and the World Bank was committed to financing responsible water development.
Australians have fared better than many other countries when it comes to water management, he said.
"Countries that have only one short rainy season ... and countries where rainfall varies from year to year by 30-40 percent...These are the poorest on the world," he said.
"Australia is an exception. Australia imported skill and imported capital and solved the problem. If Australia hadn't been colonised it might be different," he said.
Salinisation and reduced flow rates in Australia's major rivers led to the Australian government introducing the A$2 billion National Water Initiative in 2004, which has had some success in bringing major rivers back to life.
But the use of dams before and as part of the initiative were blamed for damaging Australia's river systems.
"And if you took them (the dams) all down, what would happen?" Grey asked.
"When you've got water that always flows through your taps and you've got water in your bath and you've got water to fill your saucepans to cook your food, you don't worry too much about it. But take it away?..." he asked.
IMPORTANT ASSETS
Australians, battling longstanding dry weather which hit hardest in 2002 with the country's worst drought in 100 years, have been forced to accept water restrictions in major cities as dam levels dropped to around 40 percent of capacity.
Such hardship, according to Grey, is small compared with the plight in countries with limited water infrastructure. A Columbia University seasonal storage index, which shows the amount of water needed to produce food and service other areas of the economy, shows that most poor countries have only 20-30 percent of the storage they need.
Rich countries are "over-invested" at 200 percent, Grey said.
Australia's Murray-Darling river system has 500 days of storage. Pakistan's Indus River has about 40 days.
Grey sees large dams as the solution of last resort, because they invariably entail social and environmental damage.
But popular participation, better governance and sharing benefits can make dams important assets.
"In northeast Brazil today communities compete to be the site of the next dam because it's like living on a gold mine," he said.
Communities are equity shareholders and receive benefits for 50 years, with 0.5-1.0 percent of power revenues financing community development funds, markets, schools, roads and clinics.
Source: Reuters
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