The organization stated aims are to protect rivers and defend the rights of communities that depend on them. It is active against the development model with which dams are associated, which International Rivers holds to be unsustainable. It promotes alternative solutions for meeting water, energy and flood-management needs. The organization is dedicated to giving dam-affected people the tools to participate in the development of local lands in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By facilitating international grassroots organizing and informed participation, the organization seeks to change the terms of the debate over river development. The group works with its numerous partners to advocate for social reparations, ecological restoration and decommissioning of existing dams. International Rivers states that it works to clarify the traditionally top-down decision-making of large infrastructure projects. It also argues against industry's presentation of hydropower regards climate change, making clear that reservoirs often produce greenhouse gas emissions that further impact on the environment.
Programs
The organization has undertaken a two-pronged approach to analyzing and promoting viable water and energy solutions. Combining its efforts to change global policy with campaigning on specific key projects, the organization simultaneously addresses the root causes and localized consequences of destructive dam development. Their campaigns throughout Africa, China, Latin America, South Asia and Southeast Asia focus on the intersection of dams and climate change, reforming the policies and practices of international financial institutions, and promoting water and energy solutions that recognize human rights and environmental sustainability.
Contributions
Among its accomplishments, the organization counts its integral involvement with the formation of the World Commission on Dams as one of its most important contributions. The commission was a global, multi-stakeholder body initiated in 1997 by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, formed in response to growing opposition to dams. During its two-year lifetime, the WCD conducted the most exhaustive study of dams done to date, ultimately evaluating over 1,000 dams in 79 countries. In its published final report, the WCD concluded that although "dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development, and benefits derived from them have been considerable... in too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure those benefits, especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers and by the natural environment." Since the organization's inception, worldwide construction of dams has decreased by half, and universal recognition of the consequences of hydropower continues to increase. The organization publishes a journal, World Rivers Review, focused on addressing the state of various dam projects, ecosystems, and people. It also publishes an annual report on a variety of dam-related subjects.
