Hydropower’s Low-Hanging Fruits: Leveraging least impact dams to power a net-zero future

Renewable energy is crucial to combat climate change. One scalable and efficient energy source is hydropower, which converts energy from natural watershed systems into usable electricity. Many net-zero carbon emission scenarios, which aim to balance carbon emissions produced with those removed from the atmosphere, forecast that global hydropower will have to double to meet climate targets. However, hydroelectric power comes with tradeoffs. Dams, constructed to meet various water demands, alter river continuity, disrupting downstream flow and negatively impacting natural ecosystem services. It remains unclear how much hydropower is actually needed and how much could be developed sustainably. Partnering with the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), we aim to quantify sustainable hydropower potential by leveraging global datasets on river networks, ecosystems, and existing and planned dams. We will use geospatial analysis to estimate how much hydropower capacity could be added under varying sustainability constraints and provide access through an interactive web viewer. These results will offer the first global benchmark for reconciling hydropower expansion with river conservation, furthering global net-zero carbon emissions goals.