Dams: setting a new standard for sustainability

Dams are important elements of water infrastructure and bring many benefits to society. The World Commission on Dams addressed concerns about them and practice is improving. The UN Millennium Development Goals aim to halve several unsatisfactory situations by 2015, and infrastructure contributing to their achievement should therefore be designed to halve current risks. Quantitative risk assessment methods have been developed to enumerate the safety of UK dams. Any quantitative assessment of risk necessarily raises the need to establish what risks are acceptable to society, and the work on dams has prompted the thought that acceptable risk could become an impartial, apolitical and conscionable means of establishing the standards of infrastructure that should be delivered. How the approach could be applied and developed is described.