Proving the model: how Latin America is leading on hydropower sustainability

Latin America holds some of the world’s largest untapped hydropower potential, and the region’s clean energy transition depends on developing it well. Meeting national climate commitments and universal energy access goals requires not just large-scale generation capacity, but thousands of smaller distributed schemes that can reach communities beyond the reach of major grids. The region cannot afford to get either wrong.

Latin America is already home to the most diverse portfolio of HSS-certified hydropower in the world, ranging from a 275 kW community micro-hydro in rural Colombia to two of the largest hydropower plants on earth in the Amazon basin. These projects do not just occupy different ends of a scale spectrum. They face fundamentally different challenges: different relationships with communities and Indigenous peoples, different environmental footprints, different financing structures, and different regulatory environments. Yet the same standard of sustainability applies to all of them.

This session uses that diversity as a lens through which to explore what sustainability means in practice across Latin America’s clean energy transition. Through project case studies spanning the full scale spectrum, speakers will examine the common thread that connects them: the need to demonstrate credible, independently verified sustainability performance in order to build trust with communities, attract investment, and contribute meaningfully to the region’s energy future. The session will also look forward, exploring what it would take to move from a handful of certified projects to sustainability becoming the norm across the region.

Session objectives

• Examine the sustainability challenges most specific to Latin American hydropower, including Indigenous and community rights, biodiversity in globally significant ecosystems, and operating in complex social and political environments.  
• Showcase how projects across the region are turning those challenges into opportunities, using the HSS to strengthen community relationships, unlock investment and deliver development outcomes beyond the project.  
• Demonstrate how the HSS is being applied across a uniquely diverse range of project contexts in the region, and what that experience reveals about what good sustainability practice looks like in Latin America.  
• Explore the growing role of regional governments, financiers, and civil society in raising the bar for hydropower sustainability, and the opportunities to embed good practice more systematically into policy and lending.  
• Draw out lessons from the region's leading certified projects for the next generation of hydropower development across Latin America and the Caribbean.