Publication: Managing Environmental and Social Impacts of Hydropower in Bhutan
Loading...
Files in English
1,404 downloads
Published
2016-06-15
ISSN
Date
2016-08-23
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Development of Bhutan’s untapped hydro power resources has the potential to spur economic growth, rapidly increase export revenue,reduce poverty, and bring about sustained improvements in human development. The Royal Government of Bhutan (RGoB) has,therefore, embarked on an ambitious plan to develop the renewable hydropower resourcesin the country. Large hydropower plants generating 1,606 MW are already operational,and new plants with an additional capacity of3,658 MW are under construction and expectedto be commissioned by 2018 and 19. According to these plans, the RGoB will commission closeto 12,600 MW of new hydropower by the end of the next decade, becoming by far the highest hydropower producer per capita in the world. The findings of this study are framed in the Bhutanesecontext and focus on recommendations that are relevant for Bhutan. The study has found that the main impacts of hydropower development in Bhutan relate to aquatic biodiversity and are cumulative,meaning that they are not of immediate concernbut should get priority attention once the development of hydropower accelerates. This study has identified a number of gaps inthe management of E&S impacts and rankedthem according to relevance for Bhutan. In conclusion, despite due awareness and a goodregulatory framework for managing the E&Simpacts of hydropower in Bhutan, challengesremain in the upstream planning and in the implementation of the assessment and mitigation of impacts, mainly because of the lack of capacity among key government institutions to ensure quality and enforce good practices. Addressing the capacity constraints, and providing keyinstitutions with the tools, structures, and skills necessary for proper E&S management of hydropower would benefit the sustainability of Bhutan’s natural and cultural values, as well as its hydropower and economic development.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank Group. 2016. Managing Environmental and Social Impacts of Hydropower in Bhutan. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24914 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Cumulative Impacts and Joint Operation of Small-Scale Hydropower Cascades(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-02-01)Increasing energy demands and concerns about global warming call for an increase in energy generation from renewable sources. Small hydropower plants represent a significant contribution to meet this demand. But the optimal use of this resource in a sustainable manner still remains a challenge. A cascade of small dams may have detrimental impacts on the environment and water use without implementation of proper mitigation measures and planning. To obtain more insight in the consequences of hydropower cascades and possibilities to improve the cascade planning process in order to reduce such impacts, the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade and the World Bank jointly initiated the study on cumulative impacts and joint operation of small-scale hydropower cascades Supported by the Renewable Energy Development Program (REDP) in Vietnam. Chapter two provides a brief background on the small-scale hydropower development in Vietnam including its current planning procedures, while Chapter three provides a description of the six studied river basins. Chapter four describes the approach, methods and definitions of the study. During the first phase of the study all six rivers were screened for potential significant cumulative impacts. The results of this screening were presented in a separate report, of which the summary is given in chapter five. This screening showed that for four of the rivers significant cumulative impacts can be expected, which merited further detailed analysis. These four rivers are Ngoi Xan, Nam Tha, Nam Chien and Sap. For each of the four detailed study cases a description of the river basin and hydropower cascade has been made, the hydrological and environmental impacts were assessed and opportunities for joint operations quantified. This report presents summaries of the cumulative impact analyses (chapter six) and draws general conclusions with respect to present and future environmental conditions (chapter seven). It also summarizes the results of the optimization modeling for each cascade (chapter eight) and provides recommendations for future planning and cascade operation (chapter nine).Publication Peru : Overcoming the Barriers to Hydropower(Washington, DC, 2010-05)Hydropower has been the major source of electricity in Peru, traditionally supplying more than 80 percent of electricity requirements, and serving as a source of independent generation for major mines and industries. With the development of natural gas in the early 1990s, and the opening of the Camisea pipeline, the Government of Peru's (GOP's) attention turned to providing incentives for the use of natural gas in power generation. This resulted in a virtual moratorium on hydropower development as a result of the very low price of natural gas (below economic cost). With the development of export markets for gas and increased attention to the impacts of climate change, the Government has recently begun to pay renewed attention to hydropower. Recent developments include: (a) introduction of accelerated depreciation for hydropower investments; (b) introduction of a "discount" to permit hydropower to compete with gas-fired plants in auctions; and (c) announcement of a special hydropower auction to be held in 2009 by ProInversion, the state agency for promoting private investment. The intention of this report is to assist the GOP in assessing the potential role of hydropower in the sector and the measures that could be taken to encourage its continued development as appropriate. The study was done at a particularly challenging time. First, there was considerable volatility in energy prices and investment costs, which needed to be incorporated into the analysis. Second, financial markets were in disarray and it was difficult to predict when conditions were likely to normalize. Third, the GOP recently introduced many new policies and regulatory measures through supreme decrees that are changing the regulatory system and may interact in unexpected ways.Publication New Approaches for Medium-Scale Hydropower Development in Vietnam(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-01-01)This paper provides an overview of the Trung Son hydropower project preparation experience and highlights the innovative features of the project, primarily focusing on the adoption of new approaches in project design and integration of social and environmental concerns. Through disseminating the Trung Son project experience, this paper is intended to contribute to the sustainable scale-up of medium scale hydropower in Vietnam, based on practical experience. This paper was funded by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) as part of a broader activity supporting sustainable hydropower development in Vietnam. Resources from the AusAID-East Asia infrastructure for growth trust fund supplemented those available to the World Bank task team in charge of the project. This paper is made up of three parts: Part A introduces the Trung Son hydropower project. Part B presents highlights from the Trung Son hydropower project, focusing on the main themes addressed during preparation. Part C contains the authors' conclusions about why the Trung Son hydropower project experience matters, and discusses the features that make it a good example for future scale-up of sustainable hydropower development in Vietnam as well as for hydropower development in other countries.Publication Managing Social Risks and Impacts from Hydropower Development(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09-01)The Trung Son dam is a medium-sized hydropower dam (260 megawatts) that was developed with the aim of achieving social and environmental sustainability. Experience gained from the Trung Son Hydropower Project can provide relevant information for dam projects of a similar size. This report is the result of a knowledge-sharing exercise conducted at the end of 2019 by the World Bank with Trung Son Hydropower Company Limited (TSHPCo) participation. The project benefitted from a decision-making process based on an adaptive management principle, defined by a framework of measures and implementation process. Detailed activities can evolve if they remained consistent with this framework. Experience gained from the Trung Son Hydropower Project demonstrates how relocation evolved, requiring continuous negotiations and engagement of all stakeholders to deal with unexpected problems. The critical management of downstream impacts during reservoir impoundment requires mitigation of specific risks. Assessed during the project preparation stage, downstream impacts associated with reservoir impoundment will be minimized through maintenance of a minimum environmental flow. The Trung Son reservoir area is rapidly evolving, with a newly created infrastructure network bringing both opportunities and challenges. To further provide support to local households and their communities, the scope of the corporate social responsibility of TSHPCo will need to be confirmed, and interaction with the local government is likely to continue over a long period of time.Publication Enhancing Development Benefits to Local Communities in Hydropower Projects : Technical Workshop(Washington, DC, 2010-06)The technical workshop on enhancing development benefits to local communities in hydropower projects was held in Washington, D.C., on June 26, 2008. It was hosted by the Social Development Department (SDV) and Water Anchor (ETWWA) of the World Bank. The workshop aimed to provide a platform for a discussion of past and current practices, as well as how to construct development benefits mechanisms within the specific context of hydropower projects. It also provided a forum for sharing knowledge as to how development benefits mechanisms may be applied to Bank-financed projects. The workshop had five sessions and brought together more than 60 experts from different sectors in different regions of the World Bank. Sixteen speakers gave presentations. The workshop had discussions on enhancing development benefits to local communities in hydropower projects and also covered issues pertaining to the broader range of benefit-sharing, including World Bank engagement in hydropower projects, legacy of hydropower, notion evolution, approaches and mechanisms, and good practices in benefit-sharing of hydropower projects. A range of mechanisms are available to enhance and share benefits. Benefit-sharing consists of a combination of monetary and non-monetary mechanisms adapted to specific project contexts. Monetary development benefits are linked largely to economic rent, fair distribution, full compensation, entitlements, national priorities, and optimization of opportunities, and include basically taxation, royalties, preferential rates, revenue sharing, development funds, and joint ownership. The non-monetary development benefits include, for example, allocation of fishing rights in reservoirs; priority hiring of local community members during construction; start-up support for local companies; capacity building; multipurpose infrastructure; rural electrification; and access to improved infrastructure.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Economic Development as Opportunity Equalization(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2014-05-27)Economic development should be conceived of as the degree to which an economy has implemented an efficient and just distribution of economic resources. The ubiquitous measure of GDP per capita reflects a utilitarian conception of justice, where individual utility is defined as personal income, and social welfare is the average of utilities in a population. A more attractive conception of justice is opportunity-equalization. Here, a two-dimensional measure of economic development is proposed, based upon viewing individuals’ incomes as a consequence of circumstances, effort, and policy. The first dimension is the average income level of those in the society with the most disadvantaged circumstances, and the second dimension is the degree to which total income inequality is due to differential effort, as opposed to differential circumstances. This pair of numbers is computed for a set of 22 European countries. No country dominates all others on both dimensions. The two-dimensional measure induces a partial ordering of countries with respect to development.Publication Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013)After decades of stagnation, the size of Latin America's middle class recently expanded to the point where, for the first time ever, the number of people in poverty is equal to the size of the middle class. This volume investigates the nature, determinants and possible consequences of this remarkable process of social transformation. We propose an original definition of the middle class, tailor-made for Latin America, centered on the concept of economic security and thus a low probability of falling into poverty. Given our definition of the middle class, there are four, not three, classes in Latin America. Sandwiched between the poor and the middle class there lies a large group of people who appear to make ends meet well enough, but do not enjoy the economic security that would be required for membership of the middle class. We call this group the 'vulnerable'. In an almost mechanical sense, these transformations in Latin America reflect both economic growth and declining inequality in over the period. We adopt a measure of mobility that decomposes the 'gainers' and 'losers' in society by social class of each household. The continent has experienced a large amount of churning over the last 15 years, at least 43% of all Latin Americans changed social classes between the mid 1990s and the end of the 2000s. Despite the upward mobility trend, intergenerational mobility, a better proxy for inequality of opportunity, remains stagnant. Educational achievement and attainment remain to be strongly dependent upon parental education levels. Despite the recent growth in pro-poor programs, the middle class has benefited disproportionally from social security transfers and are increasingly opting out from government services. Central to the region's prospects of continued progress will be its ability to harness the new middle class into a new, more inclusive social contract, where the better-off pay their fair share of taxes, and demand improved public services.Publication Peru : Overcoming the Barriers to Hydropower(Washington, DC, 2010-05)Hydropower has been the major source of electricity in Peru, traditionally supplying more than 80 percent of electricity requirements, and serving as a source of independent generation for major mines and industries. With the development of natural gas in the early 1990s, and the opening of the Camisea pipeline, the Government of Peru's (GOP's) attention turned to providing incentives for the use of natural gas in power generation. This resulted in a virtual moratorium on hydropower development as a result of the very low price of natural gas (below economic cost). With the development of export markets for gas and increased attention to the impacts of climate change, the Government has recently begun to pay renewed attention to hydropower. Recent developments include: (a) introduction of accelerated depreciation for hydropower investments; (b) introduction of a "discount" to permit hydropower to compete with gas-fired plants in auctions; and (c) announcement of a special hydropower auction to be held in 2009 by ProInversion, the state agency for promoting private investment. The intention of this report is to assist the GOP in assessing the potential role of hydropower in the sector and the measures that could be taken to encourage its continued development as appropriate. The study was done at a particularly challenging time. First, there was considerable volatility in energy prices and investment costs, which needed to be incorporated into the analysis. Second, financial markets were in disarray and it was difficult to predict when conditions were likely to normalize. Third, the GOP recently introduced many new policies and regulatory measures through supreme decrees that are changing the regulatory system and may interact in unexpected ways.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025: Strengthening AI Foundations(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-24)The recent rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has outpaced society’s ability to fully grasp its implications. Unlike technological shifts that have unfolded over decades, AI’s integration is accelerating at an unprecedented speed and scale. Along with AI’s immense opportunities come new responsibilities—especially for ethical deployment, accountability, and alignment with human values—that have few precedents in previous technology revolutions. This 2025 edition of the "Digital Progress and Trends Report (DPTR)" explores how low- and middle-income countries can harness AI to drive inclusive and sustainable development—and avoid being left behind. The report explains what makes AI different from earlier general-purpose technologies and why it matters for development. It introduces the 4Cs, the foundations essential for AI adoption, adaptation, and innovation: connectivity (infrastructure), compute (processing power), context (training data, algorithms, and applications), and competency (digital skills). Drawing on rich, novel data sets, this DPTR benchmarks countries across the 4Cs, analyzes supply and demand dynamics, and identifies market failures and externalities where policy action is urgently needed. This report emphasizes the need for global coordination and targeted interventions to close the widening AI gaps, where resource constraints threaten to exacerbate inequality. Policy insights will help governments unlock AI’s potential while navigating its risks.