The May 8th - 14th, 2010 edition of The Economist published a letter by President John Reid and CSF course graduate and Fellow Wilson Cabral about the Belo Monte dam. The letter pointed out that the shaky economics of the dam will create pressure for even more dam development upstream of Belo Monte. Construction of the Belo Monte on the Xingu River is rapidly moving forward. But there are positive aspects to this story. A delay in the project of several years, partly due to CSF's 2006 study of the dam, has given time for protected areas and a big new carbon project to be consolidated. This will make it harder for additional big dams, which are the real threat, to be built upstream of Belo Monte on the Xingu. And getting CSF's ideas about the importance of transparent conservation economics into such a widely circulated periodical is one more step in making CSF's kind of work the rule, not the exception.

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