As the World Bank and governments across the globe look to hydro dams to produce what they are calling “green” energy, nasty problems at older World Bank dams keep surfacing. A recent letter signed by environmental and social activists says that the World Bank-built Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos is riddled with all the resettlement, environmental, and operational problems the Bank was warned about.

The letter comes just as the World Bank hosted a ceremony to celebrate the dam and plans to promote hydropower as a both a clean source of renewable energy and a way to reduce poverty in under-developed regions.

Both of those claims, critics argue, are false.

In the letter, critics of the dam say that, “more than 6,200 ethnic minority people relocated by the project are still struggling to achieve sustainable livelihoods three years after they lost access to their natural resources such as paddy fields, swidden fields, forests and grazing lands.” Furthermore, the dislocated communities have been unable to sell commercial agricultural products to new markets in order to buy rice and other food as planned—one of the pillars of the project’s “livelihood program.”

And future income from reservoir fisheries—also expected to act as a source of income for the villagers—is increasingly unsustainable, as more residents have come to rely on it as a source of income, thus reducing yields for all fishers.

Ultimately, the letter says, “Many of the plans for securing sustainable livelihoods have failed to come to fruition, putting people’s long-term food security at risk.”

Nam Theun 2 has also worsened environmental conditions around the reservoir by making previously difficult to reach forests accessible to illegal loggers and wildlife poachers.

For the 110,000 people living along the Xe Bang Fai River, downstream from Nam Theun 2, changes to their ecosystem have made living untenable with increased flooding of riverbank gardens, riverbank erosion, a decline of fisheries, and a deterioration in water quality.

Poor disclosure about the dam’s operations have also exacerbated damages to upstream and downstream populations, say the letters signatories: “disclosure of information has been a constant battle for outside observers, with many key documents and data unavailable for public scrutiny.” Securing information about the taking of land and other assets from the affected communities has also been all but impossible and in complete violation of the World Bank’s own policies.