A recent article, published in The Guardian, says the proliferation of weirs, dams and culverts is now creating a threat to wildlife. 

The Swansea University-led project called Amber (Adaptive Management of Barriers in European Rivers), aims to find ways to halt the fragmentation of European rivers and the dangerous isolation of their habitats. “Flowing rivers are healthy rivers – and by flowing we don’t mean just water, we mean sediment, energy, nutrients and organisms,” said the project leader, Professor Carlos Garcia de Leaniz.

The trouble is that very few rivers today have flowing, healthy waters. Apart from abstraction by water companies and farmers, which lowers river levels, more and more barriers are being revealed by the Amber project, which is funded by the EU.

“In Europe we have detected 460,000 barriers, and by the end of the year we estimate that we’ll have 600,000,” said de Leaniz, director of Swansea’s Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research. These dams and weirs pepper Europe’s rivers and prevent migratory fish from swimming upstream to reach their spawning grounds in river headwaters. They also stop vital nutrients flowing downstream to the sea, to the detriment of coastal marine ecosystems.