The Costs of 'Green' Hydropower and Poor River Management

Full of beautiful forests, meadows, and wetlands, and rich in biodiversity, the unique landscape that stretches along the rivers Mura, Drava, and Danube is famously known as the Amazon of Europe. This large biotope network, more than 700 kilometres long, connects five countries – Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia. It was the borders that kept this green belt protected from devastating human influence until the nineties, but soon after, as ideas to protect this valuable green heart of Europe slowly started to take shape, exploitation was already in full swing.

In 2021, the 5-Country Biosphere Reserve Mura-Drava-Danube, composed of 300,000 ha of protected areas and agreed between all five countries, was officially recognized by UNESCO, which was meant to boost protection efforts. But for some parts of this precious ecosystem – as our team learned – it might already be too late.

In the last two decades, this area became a prime example of how popular, supposedly “green” energy solution – hydropower plants – comes at a great price. The changes in river flow caused by existing plants in the upper parts of the river – 22 of them solely on Drava – are decreasing the amount of sediment, deepening the riverbed, and lowering the water levels. All those changes are increasingly harming plant and animal species, transforming, in the process, the whole ecosystem. Through extensive interviews with scientists, activists, and citizens living on and from the rivers, and by comparing existing regulations with the situation in the field, we learned that protection efforts are far from enough to reverse the damage. In some countries, their implementation is hardened by the fact that regulations are sometimes ignored to serve economic purposes like sand mining or commercial river transport, and sometimes they collide with the flood prevention strategies. And when it comes to pollution coming into rivers from the agricultural fields, strict regulation doesn’t even exist. Climate change, which additionally decreases the water level, is complicating an already complex situation.

The old ways of water management, warn the experts, are not sustainable anymore.

Image by Matjaž Tančič / Inland and Mélanie Wenger / Inland