FIVE YEARS AGO International Rivers started monitoring the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean
Development Mechanism, concerned that funds marked for climate change mitigation would be
used to encourage construction of otherwise uneconomic large hydropower projects, taking limited
funds away from renewable energy projects in real need of support, and subsidizing the social and
environmental impacts that large hydropower often produces. What has actually happened is worse
than we expected. The CDM is blindly subsidizing the destruction of rivers, while the dams it supports
are helping destroy the environmental integrity of the CDM.
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