Clearing Danube Bottlenecks Stirs Controversy

The European Commission has great plans for the Danube River, the most international body of flowing water in the world. It plans to widen it and promote navigation like on the German Rhine River, but critics say that major natural wonders may be jeopardized in the process.

These plans are part of the European Union (EU) Strategy for the Danube Region. It is widely believed that this endeavor will boost the economy of nations on the river, and that ship traffic will become a lot easier.

But the thing about natural bottlenecks is that each one of them features its individual ecosystem, which cannot be found anywhere else on the Danube, let alone other rivers.

According to experts at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the new plans threaten to destroy the most scenic and natural values that the Danube has to offer, and is also famous for.

Some 100 million people live on the river's banks, and 25 million of them depend on its water for quenching their thirst, and for supporting the local industry. The Danube River basic covers 19 countries in central and eastern Europe.

“Heavy investments in diking and dredging the Danube have been justified by various officials with reference to the Rhine river,” explains the director of the WWF Danube-Carpathian Program, Andreas Beckmann.

“But the Rhineland has very different conditions from the Danube area, with an industrial base that has developed over centuries and not just thanks to the river,” he goes on to say.

“Expecting an economic miracle from investments in Danube navigation is a myth, and potentially a very costly mistake,” the WWF official argues.

What the EU wants to do is eliminate regions on the river that are natural obstacles to navigation during times when water levels are low. These are called bottlenecks, as ship traffic is very slow here.

But intervening on the waters with expensive and obsolete infrastructure and technologies is not only detrimental to local ecosystems, but to the overall dynamic and morphology of the river, which produces one of the most beautiful deltas in the world.

The Danube Delta, located in Romania, and bordering the Ukraine, features an amazing biodiversity of both flora and fauna, which is renowned the world over. The delta could be severely affected by the new plans.

Additionally, as the WWF expert highlights, some of the areas that will be most affected by the changes include reservations and national monuments that have been designated EU Natura 2000 sites, or national parks.

“Today [December 9] is a sad day,” explains prominent Romanian environmentalist Petruta Moise. Her office is located in the Danube city of Galati, and she sees the river every day from her window.

“It’s sad not because there will be navigation along the Danube River – the river has always been navigable – but because of the narrow mindset of the hydrologists and river engineers, who were all trained over the past 50 years and this is their final lifetime opportunity to get things wrong,” she says.

“It's the same pattern of thinking that made it possible for the former river wetlands and floodplains to be destroyed for good starting back in the early 1970s,” the expert says.

The effects of those measures, taken by the former Communist regime that ruled Romania until 1989, are felt now, decades later, when each rise in Danube water levels threaten to flood the twin cities of Galati and Braila.

“I feel sad because I truly believed in all the decision makers' capacity for understanding the issues here. But who will pay the price now for doing things in an unsustainable way? You do not need to be smart to know that,” Moise concludes.