09/29/2026
We have seen this before.
Inga in the DRC, Rogun in Tajikistan, Mphanda Nkuwa in Mozambique.
For decades, the World Bank helped finance some of the world’s largest dams. A massive destruction of rivers and communities. But by the 1990s, growing evidence of their social and environmental impacts had forced a reckoning, and they dramatically scaled back their investments in hydropower.
Those lessons should matter, but mega-dams are moving back onto the development agenda.
In 2016, the World Bank withdrew from the Inga 3 project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2025, it returned, approving the first $250 million phase of a $1 billion program intended to lay the groundwork for the project’s future development.
Rebranding destructive infrastructure as clean, green energy, even as the climate, biodiversity, financial, and social risks remain, should not be acceptable. When projects bring methane emissions, ecosystem destruction, growing debt, climate-driven operational risks and disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples and local communities, calling them “green” does not make those costs disappear.
As the World Bank prepares to meet in Bangkok in the next few weeks, International Rivers reinforces that mega-dams are not the energy transition we need. It’s time to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.
