The World Bank will decide soon whether or not to finance a dam that would drown Uganda’s Bujagali rapids, one of the country’s prime tourist destinations on the Victoria Nile.

Thai government agrees to open Pak Mun dam gates

The World Bank has cancelled a highly contentious loan to China for an “anti-poverty program” that would have resettled 58,000 Chinese farmers in an area claimed by Tibetans as part of their homeland.

News brief: Salween dams

In the last remaining tropical rainforest of Colombia’s Caribean coast, te Embera Katio indigenous people are fighting for their survival and for compensation for the destruction of their rainforest. The Urra dam, built in part with financing from Canada’s Export Development Corporation, is the cause of their woes.

History is repeating itself as foreign financiers consider new loans for the Senegal River project in West Africa, a grand plan to generate electriciy, irrigate agricultural land, and aid navigation.

A leaked report by the World Bank Inspection Panel has revealed that the bank committed a “serious violations of its policies and procedures” in approving its most recent loan to India’s National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) for the massive and controversial thermal power and coal mining projects in the Singrauli area of India.

For more than a quarter of a century, Canadian mining giant Placer Dome has mined copper on Marinduque Island in the Philippines through its 40%-owned subsidaiary, the Marcopper Mining Corporation. Marcopper’s operations have brought environmental harm and hardship to many Marinduque communities, a legacy that culminated last year in a major environmental disaster.