March 2022 Under the patronage of His Royal Highness Prince El-Hassan bin Talal of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Chairman of the Higher Council for Science and Technology, the University of Manchester (United Kingdom), Methods for Irrigation and Agriculture...

Latin America is currently seeing a boom in the construction of new dams. Brazil is the world’s third largest producer of hydroelectric energy, largely thanks to its abundant water resources. Small-scale hydropower dams (locally known as PCHs) have become an...

Near-term concerns about the impact of The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on water availability for Egypt and Sudan are unlikely to materialise, but drought preparedness will require careful coordination, suggests research published today by researchers from...

Watch Julien Harou's FutureDAMS presentation 'New approaches for managing water under regional resource conflicts'.  The webinar was part of the ‘Water Research at Manchester - Water and Sustainable Development’ event convened by Manchester Environmental Research...

By Julien Harou, Mathaios Panteli, Jose Gonzalez Cabrera, Gloria Salmoral and Rose Sumner. Traditionally planners considered the effects of water and energy systems on the other in simplified ways or not at all. This has often led to inefficient use of resources and a...

By Sarah Redicker and Roshan Adhikari, The Global Development Institute The Covid-19 pandemic is having wide ranging effects on agricultural systems including major disruptions in food supply chains and other shocks affecting food production, as well as rural...

In their most recent paper, 'Mapping the evolving complexity of large hydropower project finance in low and lower-middle income countries', published in Green Finance, Markkanen, Plummer Braeckman and Souvannaseng describe and compare the advantages and limitations of...

FutureDAMS researchers are developing an agent-based model[10] called WATERING (WATER user associations at the Interface of Nexus Governance) to explore the management of WUAs and suggest alternative, viable, context-based approaches to decentralised water management. WATERING investigates the role of WUAs working with large irrigation schemes and those benefiting from small dams.

By Sanna Markkanen The new FutureDAMS working paper is the second in a series emerging from the CISL’s contribution to the FutureDAMS project, with a specific focus on the questions around sustainable finance for sustainable hydropower projects in low-income and...

International climate funds, set up to finance the global transition to a low carbon future has the potential to invest in hydropower to enable the shift to reliable, affordable, clean distributed smart grids and incentivise infrastructure which is socially,...

By Jamie Skinner, IIED Millions of people have been displaced by reservoir construction around the world and the negative effects this has had on their livelihoods has prompted many questions about the uneven distribution of costs and benefits of large dams....

The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) are seeking responses to an online survey: 'Financing Energy Infrastructure'. The purpose of the survey is to help understand how financiers make decisions on renewable energy infrastructure...

Development is undergoing an infrastructure turn, no more so than in resurgent dam building. But how are new projects planned and constructed? Are we seeing the underestimation of economic, environmental and social costs? Have past critiques changed infrastructure...

FutureDAMS is all about improving the decision-making around large dams. Where to build them, how to reduce negative impacts, how to maximise positive impacts, and, occasionally, when not to build them. Twenty years ago, the World Commission on Dams (WCD, 1998-2000)...

New open access research by The University of Manchester’s Robel Geressu and Julien Harou shows that if dam re-operation is considered in planning systems of dams, future designs of these costly water-energy-food systems can be drastically improved. They were able to...

‘Connected and Flowing’, the recent report by WWF and The Nature Conservancy was co-authored by FutureDAMS research director, Julien Harou. It recommends that any new dams should be subject to a system scale trade-off analysis, of the type that FutureDAMS is...

Yesterday we were joined by Frauke Urban, Associate Professor in the Management of Sustainable Energy Systems at KTH, as part of the FutureDAMS lecture series. The lecture focused on the findings from her recent comparative study of Chinese hydropower dams in Africa...

FutureDAMS Ghana team have written their first working paper for the project. It provides a comprehensive overview of the history of dams in the Ghana up to the present day, covering their technical details, planning processes and politics. This piece of work is...

Dr. Emanuele Fantini, Senior Lecturer at the IHE Delph Institute for Water Education, recently outlined the initial findings of his research project on media narratives and trans-boundary cooperation in the Nile basin, as part of the FutureDAMS lecture series....

The FutureDAMS working paper series is now fully underway. The latest piece is by two researchers on the project, Dr Tom Lavers and Dr Barnaby Dye. They present an overview of the literature on the politics of dams, which has been analysed from a range of disciplinary...