A senior Chinese official who had warned of impending environmental disaster in the Three Gorges dam region now says the damage caused by the project is not as bad as expected.

In an interview published by China’s tightly controlled Xinhua news service, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the Three Gorges project committee in charge of overseeing the world’s largest hydroelectric scheme, said environmental problems were less serious than predicted in feasibility reports from the early 1990s.