For the past five years Dam Removal Europe (DRE), a coalition of the World Wildlife Fund, The Rivers Trust, The Nature Conservancy, European Rivers Network, Rewilding Europe, and Wetlands International Europe, has published an annual progress report on dam removals throughout Europe. Its main aim is to evaluate the advancement of EU policy implementation and to analyse the progress and impact of barrier removal as a river restoration measure Europe-wide.
Dam Removal Europe says such a comprehensive analysis of barrier removal ‘is imperative to ensure false facts and misleading information regarding this practice can be debunked based on actual facts and scientific evidence’, as was recently done with the claims that dam removals were to blame for the flooding in Valencia, Spain in October 2024.
Over 1.2 million barriers, including dams, weirs and culverts, fragment European rivers. Tens of thousands of them are obsolete but can block the natural flow of water, sediments, nutrients and species – contributing to a reported 75% decline in freshwater migratory fish populations in Europe since 1970.
Data presented in this report is provided by ministries, municipalities, water agencies, river trusts, NGOs, scientists, researchers, and river restoration practitioners. DRE says accurately estimating the total number of barrier removals per year is a highly complex endeavour because the verification process of such projects, and whether they satisfy the DRE criteria of a barrier removal, is time consuming. A centralised process to gather such information nationwide is in place in countries like Spain, France and Denmark, but is lacking in most other European countries. In that respect, DRE believes the final number of removed barriers reported should be considered an underestimation.
Record year for barrier removal
In 2024, 542 barriers were removed in 23 countries – an 11% increase on previous records. This meant over 2900km of rivers were reconnected across the continent and four countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic and Turkey, removed their first barriers. Finland also made its debut at the top of the list, with at least 138 barrier removals, followed by France, Spain and Sweden.
Most of the removed barriers were obsolete culverts (45%) and weirs( 43%), which can be dismantled cost-effectively, and have a significant cumulative impact. For example, five barriers were removed along an 11km stretch of the Giovenco River in Italy in 2024, restoring its natural flow for the first time in decades.
Dams were the next common type of removal at 8%, followed by fords and sluices. Sixty-five percent of removed barriers were lower than 2m, 34% were 2-5m high and 1% were more than 5m high. Sixteen of the removed barriers were originally built for hydropower production.
Free flow
2024 was also the year when the EU Nature Restoration Regulation came into force with one of its goals to restore at least 25000km of fragmented rivers to a free-flowing state by 2030. Barrier removals will also be a key tool in achieving the goals of the global Freshwater Challenge, which the EU has joined and which aims to ensure 300,000km of degraded rivers are under restoration by 2030.
