Since Myanmar’s phased transition to democracy began in 2010, the resource-rich country of 53 million consumers has had one of Asia’s fastest growing economies. Electricity demand has surged past available supplies by a factor of 15 percent annually and is expected to more than double by 2020. Rolling brownouts are common and investor optimism, both foreign and domestic, is fading. Although often eclipsed by interest in the hydrocarbon and mining sectors, Myanmar’s hydrological resources are its most important natural resource. Hydropower generates two thirds of Myanmar’s modest 4.9 gigawatts of installed capacity, a small slice of the country’s 95GW of untapped hydropower potential. Not surprisingly, the Ministry of Electricity and Energy has turned to the nation’s free flowing rivers to address this widening electricity supply-demand gap and fill the government’s coffers through regional electricity exports. At least 50 large (greater than 30 megawatts) hydropower plants with a combined capacity exceeding 40GW are slated for development. The rivers that host these projects, and the ecosystems they inextricably link, are also at the core of Myanmar’s food and nutritional security. Rivalling the production of the entire lower Mekong Basin, Myanmar’s inland fisheries yield an estimated 900,000 tonnes of fish and aquaculture annually that the Food and Agriculture Organization recognises as the most important protein source in the Myanmar diet by a factor of 10 to 1. If developed as planned, the 50 large hydropower projects would permanently segment watersheds, flatten the peaks and valleys of the flood pulse and trap nutrient-rich sediment behind dams. The productivity of inland fisheries would gradually erode, annually inundated floodplains would shrink and the country’s rice bowl the Ayeyarwady Delta would be denied the fertile silt and water flows essential to sustaining yields. The Myanmar government’s hydropower development plans have therefore inspired waves of opposition from project area and downstream communities, civil society organisations and NGOs. Numerous large-scale projects planned for upland ethnic areas are also frustrating efforts to secure a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement. Reasonable and reliable electricity is a prerequisite to economic growth and social development. But must it come at the expense of increased conflict or Myanmar’s age-old rice-fish agricultural systems and the lives, livelihoods and deep cultural traditions it embodies? The International Financial Corporation is leading efforts to answer this question through a countrywide Strategic Environmental Assessment aimed at helping policymakers, developers and investors improve sectoral planning. The study represents a critical step to better understanding and mitigating the environmental and social risks of widespread hydropower development. However, its implementation will take time, and Myanmar needs power now. Energy leapfrogging and the megatrend Ds’ Driven by the plummeting costs of mobile connectivity, Myanmar’s mobile phone subscriber base skyrocketed from 5.1 million users in January 2014 to 43 million users by April 2016 that’s nearly 1.4 million new users per month. These numbers led analysts to predict that Myanmar would become not just a mobile-first environment, but a mobile-only market. Much of today’s modern power infrastructure, especially in Myanmar, is the metaphorical equivalent of the operator-managed, landline call centres of the 1950s. Large, centrally-located and dispatched generating assets push power, typically in a single direction, across vast transmission and distribution networks to end users. A similar, smartphone-like disruption looms over the power sector. It has often been summed up as the three megatrend Ds: decentralisation (generating power closer to where it is consumed), decarbonisation (reducing the use of fossil fuels in favour of renewable) and digitization, or the internet of energy (the fine-grained monitoring and control of electricity flows to optimise transmission and distribution). Globally, technological advancements driving down the costs of wind, solar and mini-grids are spurring decentralisation and decarbonisation, and slowly chipping away at the long-held monopoly of large fossil fuel facilities on economies of scale. Hydropower is poised to play an important role in accelerating these trends, particularly in monsoonal climates where solar and water resources share an inverse and thus complementary relationship. New material and design innovations are, for example, contributing to the development of more cost-effective and modular hydropower turbines and related cost-saving civil works innovations. Coupled with our improved understanding of the costs of ecosystem damage, the economics of hydropower are shifting, making smaller, utility-scale projects more economically viable. How can distributed hydropower help Myanmar? Not unlike mobile telecoms infrastructure, the development of decentralised hydropower resources offers Myanmar an accelerated and more equitable pathway to unlocking the benefits of reliable and affordable electricity. Integrated networks of distributed hydropower projects have less impact, are more socially acceptable and rapidly deployable at scale, yet are capable of providing utility-scale power to address Myanmar’s urgent electricity supply shortfalls. Distributed hydropower projects can also incorporate water supply and irrigation systems to amplify the positive effects of improved energy access with dual-use infrastructure that serves other social and economic purposes. A distributed approach to hydropower development may also help ease tensions between the government and ethnic groups by ensuring the benefits of electricity access and economic development are more quickly extended to isolated upland areas through hybrid mini-grids. Once integrated with the national grid, these mini-grids could be leveraged to provide high-value grid services, creating the technical space to enhance the resilience of and decarbonise Myanmar’s national grid with large-scale intermittent renewables. Distributed hydropower is by no means the only solution to Myanmar’s energy needs. Some large hydropower projects will be developed, and should be when the environmental and social costs of projects are minimal and the affected communities agree. As stewards of the planet’s resources, however, we have a moral obligation to, and an existential interest in, promoting low carbon development pathways that minimise the impact on the ecosystem, especially when their presence disproportionately benefits society’s most vulnerable. In this regard, policymakers, developers and investors would be wise to consider distributed hydropower as an accelerated and utility-enhancing solution to help meet Myanmar’s pressing electricity, water and sanitation needs.