LONDON Giant hydroelectric dams being built or planned in remote areas of Brazil, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Peru and Guyana will devastate tribal communities by forcing people off their land or destroying hunting and fishing grounds, according to a report by Survival International on Monday.

The first global assessment of its kind suggests more than 300,000 indigenous people could be pushed towards economic ruin and, in the case of some isolated Brazilian groups, to extinction.

The dams are intended to provide low-carbon electricity for burgeoning cities, but the report says tribal people living in their vicinity will gain little or nothing. At least 200,000 people from eight tribes are threatened and a further 200,000 people will be adversely affected by the Gibe III dam on the Omo river in Ethiopia. Ten thousand people in Sarawak, Malaysia, have been displaced by the Bakun dam, and a series of Latin American dams could force many thousands off their land.

The authors say enthusiasm for large dams is resurfacing, driven by a powerful lobby presenting them as a significant solution to climate change. Lyndsay Duffield, said “The lessons learned last century are being ignored, and tribal peoples worldwide are again being sidelined, their rights violated and their lands destroyed.”

The report says the World Bank is one of the biggest funders of destructive dams, despite worldwide criticism in the 1990s for supporting such projects. Its portfolio now stands at $11bn, with funding up more than 50 per cent on 1997.

The UN now subsidises dam building via the clean development mechanism (CDM), which allows rich countries to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by investing in clean energy in poor countries. The group CDM Watch says more than a third of all CDM-registered projects in 2008 were for hydropower, making them the most common type of project vying for carbon credits.Concern is growing over the role of China, now the world's largest builder and funder of big dams. The firm behind the controversial Three Gorges dam, which has displaced more than a million people from around the Yangtze river in the last 20 years, has been contracted to build a dam on the land of the Penan tribe in Sarawak. China's biggest state bank may fund Gibe III in Ethiopia, to be Africa's tallest.

The report says tribes have borne the brunt of the development. In India, at least 40pc of people displaced by dams and other projects are tribal, though they make up just 8pc of the country's population.

“There is an endemic tendency within the dam industry to significantly underestimate the number of people to be affected by their projects,” it says.

“The World Bank's review of big dam projects over 10 years found that the number of people actually evicted was nearly 50pc higher than the planning estimates.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service