Rivers without Boundaries: Guarding Lake Baikal's Free-Flowing Feeder Rivers

Rivers without Boundaries is an international coalition of NGOs and river experts from Mongolia, Russia, China and the US, founded in 2009 and registered as an NGO in Mongolia, that campaigns to keep the transboundary rivers feeding Lake Baikal free of large dams. It has spent over a decade contesting a series of hydropower megaprojects proposed for the Selenga River basin — including the Shuren, Orkhon and Egiin-Gol dams — that would disrupt the main water source of the Baikal UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it helped trigger a 2017 World Bank funding freeze on the Shuren project. In the year to July 2026 alone, the coalition submitted ten monitoring reports to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, keeping cumulative-impact-assessment requirements alive on dam projects the Committee has flagged as a risk to Baikal since 2013.