Nature Geoscience and Sustainability urge the public to reconsider its views on dams. The Nature Geoscience study relays alarming data that debunks previous assumptions that hydrological dams are net carbon stores, demonstrating instead that dams release twice as much carbon as they store. Meanwhile, a collection of studies in Sustainability report that only 17 percent of rivers globally are both free-flowing and within protected areas. The messages in these studies join together to ask: What does it mean for our planet that the vast majority of our river systems are dammed and what are the wider consequences of hydrological damming? As the video above explains, there are over 60,000 large dams globally and over 3,700 more currently planned or under construction. Of those 3,700, over 500 will be built in protected areas - which begs the question, how protected can our remaining free-flowing rivers actually be?