Europe Removes Record Number of River Barriers
- Editor OGN Daily
- 55 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Hundreds of dams, weirs, culverts and sluices dismantled in 2024 to help waterways resume natural course.
The EU has committed to restoring 25,000km (15,535 miles) of river to a free-flowing state by 2030 after passing a law to restore nature last year. Member states must agree an action plan by the middle of 2026 outlining how they will meet the targets.
So, it's good to know that Europe dismantled 542 river-blocking dams, weirs, culverts and sluices in 2024, helping a record number of waterways resume their natural course. That is an 11 percent increase from the year before, according to an annual report from Dam Removal Europe. It found 23 countries had removed a river barrier last year, four of which - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic and Turkey - did so for the first time. The report found Finland removed the most barriers, totalling 138 removals, followed by France at 128, Spain with 96, Sweden 45 and the UK at 28.
Jelle de Jong, the chief executive of WWF Netherlands, said the rise in removals showed that communities and governments were increasingly seeing the benefits of reconnecting and restoring rivers.
“Healthy, free-flowing rivers are central to adapting to the climate crisis and boosting biodiversity, but Europe’s rivers are the most fragmented in the world,” he said. “We need to keep scaling up the removal of small obsolete dams that are blocking our rivers and set new records every year.”
Dam Removal Europe, a coalition of environmental groups pushing to restore the free-flowing state of rivers and streams, said the lack of centralised databases meant their figures probably underestimated the number of removed river barriers.
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