How The ‘Amazon Of Europe’ Is Paying The Price Of Hydropower And Poor River Management – Analysis
Restoring the unique ecosystem along the Mura, Drava and Danube rivers is being hampered by controversial water management practices still taking place in protected areas, sometimes under the supervision of the same state agencies in charge of restoration.
By Vedrana Simicevic
Back in the 1970s, Marijan Kolednjak grew up closely connected to the Drava, a majestic river that originates in Italy, passes through four countries before joining the Danube close to the border between Croatia and Serbia.
“The river was so full of fish back then that we could use just gubasnica[simple fishing rods improvised from a sewing needle and bamboo] to catch them during the spawning period,” says Kolednjak, president of the local fishing club in Opcina Cestica, located in the northern part of Croatia.
Today, things are radically different. Some of the most common species like smud (zander) and bolen (asp) have become rare sights, while Kolednjak remembers how much stronger and higher the river was back then. The markings on the riverbank clearly show that the level is now at least a metre lower.
It’s even worse underground. “The water pipes used for local supply usually went 6 metres deep in the ground. Now you must dig at least 11-12 metres to find the water,” he says.
These massive changes are mostly attributed to the large number of hydroelectric power (HEP) plants located mainly in the Austrian and Slovenian parts of the Drava, 22 in total. The lower Croatian part is now the central point of restoration efforts to save one of the last primeval river landscapes of Europe, a unique green belt which stretches 700 kilometres along the Mura, Drava and Danube rivers.
This area, known as the “Amazon of Europe”, is a prime example of how the second largest renewable electricity source, hydroelectric power, comes at a huge price – destroyed river ecosystems. Activities like sediment extraction and deforestation have caused additional harm.
BIRN investigations show that restoration of the river ecosystem remains a far-off prospect. The planned conservation projects are still too small to reverse the historical damage and protection is additionally hampered by controversial water management practices that still take place in protected areas, sometimes supervised by the very same state agencies that are in charge of restoration.

Over exploitation
Full of beautiful forests, meadows and wetlands and rich in biodiversity, this large biotope network of protected habitats, home to many rare and endangered species that rely on the river ecosystem, connects five countries – Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary and Serbia.
Thirty years ago, the strict border policies in place kept the nature in this area isolated from any intensive human activity. Since the start of the 1990s, however, exploitation of the rivers began to gain momentum.
“During the 60s and 70s, a lot of rivers had been destroyed in Austria, Germany and Middle Europe in general, but this area was kept pristine. The question was how to preserve it from the same fate,” explains Austrian landscape ecologist Arno Mohl from WWF Austria, one of the creators of The Biosphere Reserve Mura-Drava-Dunav initiative (TBR MDD), launched in the 1990s.
The years of conservation efforts culminated in 2021, when this transboundary reserve, arranged between five countries and patched together from 300,000 hectares of protected areas, was officially recognised by UNESCO.
As part of attempts to restore degraded river sections and floodplains, 17 large restoration projects worth almost 60 million euros have already been rolled out under the aegis of TBR MDD. The EU, keen to jump on the conservation bandwagon turned its biodiversity strategy into the new Nature Restoration Law, which instructs member states on efforts to restore 25,000 kilometres of rivers by 2030.
Hydropeaking
Although no more hydroelectric plants are allowed in the TBR MDD area, the rivers and biodiversity still suffer from the existing plants, which harm the river ecosystems in several ways.
The parts of the rivers immediately below the plants experience the wrath of so-called hydropeaking – the sudden change in the water flow whenever the plant needs more water to produce more energy. The sharp changes in water level and flow velocity are extremely harmful to river organisms.
“One to five metres difference in the level can happen even twice in a day, and that is especially catastrophic for the fish population,” explains Mohl.
According to WWF Austria and EuroNatur experts, four fish species have already disappeared from the Drava: the grayling, the Danube streber, the starlet and the bullhead. Nine others are in steep decline.
The existing plants in the upper parts also dramatically disturb sediment transport. The gravel and sand that rivers naturally carry downstream are essential for forming flood plains and their fragile ecosystems, and for maintaining the natural state of the riverbed. When plants and their dams retain the water, sediment is retained too. With less sediment coming downstream, the riverbed deepens over time.
“It means you get the deep channel with a lower water level that loses connection to flood plains, which then dry out, losing existing biodiversity,” says Dr Martin Pusch from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin.
The deepening of the riverbed affects the level of underground water too. “On the Drava, the massive amount of sediment is stopped by more than 20 hydropower plants. The river, once rich with branches, became a channel and the consequence is a loss of habitats, drying of forests and many dried-up wells,” explains Jasmin Sadikovic, president of the NGO Green Osijek and one of the leaders of the large transboundary river restoration project LIFE RESTORE for MDD, worth 20 million euros.
Restoration projects like these are focused on preserving the floodplain forests, widening the riverbed, reconstructing side channels, and distributing the sediment for the development of new natural gravel and sand bars. It includes the removal of artificial embankments so that the river can erode sediment from its banks.
“To restore the rivers to their natural state before the hydropower plants is impossible; you can only mitigate consequences. And that is precisely what we are trying to accomplish with these projects,” says Sadikovic.
The restoration of the rivers, he emphasises, is also important for flood control. “Over time, people got too close to the river, leaving too little space for the natural flow. This is becoming more problematic with climate change, when heavy rainfall happens over a short period, and the river doesn’t have space to grow, which increases the risk of heavy flooding,” says Sadikovic.
With the restoration or creation of side channels, the excess water will be able to overflow from the riverbed more slowly and be absorbed by the floodplains, he explains.
Yet this restoration flies in the face of old methods of river management, which rely on building embankments and extracting sediment to deepen the riverbed as the best strategies to prevent flooding.
“This old way of thinking was proved to be wrong. The embankments and riverbed deepening will briefly lower the water level at a particular location during the flood. But if you do that in many places, you will worsen the situation,” argues Pusch, pointing out that within these artificially limited river channels, water flows faster and flood waves will form quicker and higher.
Despite that, many national strategies still incorporate “old ways” into water management and rarely compromise with the need for river restoration.
Conflict of interests
It’s not uncommon that, under the justification of the fight against floods or waterway maintenance, harmful projects are still taking place in different parts of the Biosphere Reserve. These interventions include the same activities recognised by TBR MDD strategies as harmful to the ecosystem, like sediment extraction, forest cutting or embankment construction.
Some of these projects are even managed by state agencies in charge of restoration programs or by local authorities. In Croatia, for example, the national agency for water management, Hrvatske vode, is conducting a number of interventions on the Drava with potentially harmful activities, while at the same time leading LIFE RESTORE for MDD projects involving riverbed and habitat restoration.
In Croatia, however, there is hardly any control over what is happening on the ground. Most construction projects on the river, even if they are done in the Nature 2000 area, get released from obligations to go through detailed Environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures, according BIRN’s investigations. The official decisions that all these projects will not be harmful to the environment is always justified with minimal assessment analysis ordered by investors.
The best-known of such controversial projects happened four years ago when Hrvatske vode got the green light from the Ministry of Environmental Protection to extract a large amount of sediment from the Drava, near the city of Osijek, without any obligation to go through EIA procedures. Environmental NGOs – WWF Adria, Zelena akcija, BIOM and the Croatian Society for Bird Protection – sued the ministry, stating that the project is harmful.
A year earlier, on the initiative of Ivan Anusic, then prefect of Osjecko-baranjska county (and currently deputy prime ninister and defence minister), the Croatian government allowed river sediment exploitation, lifting the ban that had been in place for the previous decade. Anusic stated in the media that sediment extraction is important for maintaining the waterways and that gravel should be used for profit. In 2021. Hrvatske vode received permission from the government to sell the extracted sediment at a price of 49.5 kuna per cubic metre (about 6.50 euros).
The extraction abruptly stopped in 2021 after the High Administrative Court revoked the ministry’s decision over the EIA procedure. By then, almost 300,000 cubic metres of sediment had been dug out.
Even so, Hrvatske vode seems not to have given up on the project. After the Environment Ministry issued a new decision that an EIA procedure would be required, the water agency issued a tender invitation to conduct the EIA study at the end of 2023. According to the procurement description, it still intends to extract the remaining 165,304 cubic metres of sediment if a positive EIA decision is received from the Environment Ministry. In fact, nobody applied to the tender.
NGOs warn that the majority of decisions deeming EIA procedures unnecessary are ordered at the county level, where the control mechanisms are less stringent.
“An increasing number of projects are discussed on a county level which don’t possess enough expert capacity to asses properly potential harm for the environment. And remarks from civil society get completely ignored,” says biologist-ecologist Tibor Mikuska, lead project manager at the Croatian Society for the Birds and Nature Protection.
Scrolling through decisions made at the Osjecko-Baranjska and Varazdinska counties, where most of the protected parts of TBR MDD in Croatia are located, it is plain that even in the last few years the majority of interventions on the river avoided any EIA procedures.
In July, for example, a decision was made for the construction of port infrastructure at Topoljski Dunavac by port authority Vukovar, which includes embankment construction, removal of vegetation and extraction of 2,000 cubic metres of sediment from the river. Even more sediment, 24,000 cubic metres, is set to be extracted for the construction of a dock for river boats as a part of the maintenance of Daljski channel conducted by the Erdut municipality.
Six months ago, a two-year renewal was approved for the reconstruction and extension of the embankment “ZOO garden” in Osijek managed by Hrvatske vode. In an opinion from 2022, the Department for Environmental Protection at the Environment Ministry stated that following the completion of the project additional worsening of the hydro-morphological state of Drava could be expected, which might “present an obstacle in the future improvement of the watercourse”. Even so, the Department for Environmental Protection concluded that an EIA was not necessary.
At the end of 2022, another project of Hrvatske vode, focused on the reconstruction of the embankment Visnjevac near Osijek, received 110 remarks from citizens and NGOs. They argued that the intervention is unnecessary and planned forest cutting would be extremely harmful. Almost none of the remarks were accepted.
These are only a few examples of at least a dozen recent potentially harmful projects located in protected areas that didn’t have to go through a proper EIA evaluation. And some of them, paradoxically, are funded by EU funds aimed at nature protection and restoration.
In a recent report by the NGOs Bankwatch and Euronatur, published in October, the authors listed a number of EU-funded projects which, they argued, have caused direct harm to biodiversity.
Among the mentioned examples is another restoration project managed by Hrvatske vode in cooperation with the Croatian state agency in charge of forest management, Hrvatske sume. The goal of the project, which received 3.6 million euros of EU funds under Croatia’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, is to restore a side branch of the Drava River, improve ecological conditions and mitigate flood risks.
The report accuses Hrvatske sume of unnecessarily cutting 15-metre-wide and 5.5-kilometre-long corridors on both banks of the old side branch, damaging protected alluvial forests. The cutting was reported to NGOs by local citizens. Hrvatske sume argued it needed to create the passages for its equipment.
Hrvatske vode did not reply to BIRN inquiries about the aforementioned projects.
A wider problem
Croatia is not the only TBR MDD country where restoration is coming up against harmful practices. Another example from the Bankwatch and Euronatur report refers to maintenance work done on the Drava by the Slovenian Water Agency, between the village Nova vas pri Markovcih and the Croatian border. This part of Drava is not in the TBR MDD area, but it does belong to the Natura 2000 network. According to the report, 15,000 cubic metres of gravel had been extracted by March 2024, marking the return of a long-forbidden practice.
Slovenian ecologist Damijan Denac, director of the large nature conservation NGO DOPPS-Birdlife and one of the collaborators in the report, says that sand and gravel extraction of this kind has not happened in Slovenia for the last 20 years. This, however, changed after the massive floods in 2023, which prompted the Slovenian government to introduce a law permitting water maintenance work without EIA procedures.
“Last year, concessioners in charge of maintenance requested permission to extract sediment at the two locations. They got on with it, despite a negative opinion from the Slovenian Institute for Nature Conservation,” says Denac.
After lobbying from activists, extraction was stopped, but Denac fears that this could signal the wider return of harmful practices.
The Slovenian Institute for Nature Conservation confirmed to BIRN that the Slovenian part of the Biosphere Reserve – which only includes the Mura river – is not being spared some of these dubious practices. Over the years, the institute has submitted several reports to state inspectors about the illegal expansion of the Krapje gravel pit, which resulted in the disappearance of 6 hectares of flood forests. The gravel pit is still in operation.
As for the Danube, making up a third of the Biosphere Reserve rivers, a new set of problems for conservation efforts has arisen over recent years because of climate change.
“Water levels are generally decreasing. The Danube is still heavily used for water transport and ships need a certain depth of the waterway – this tends to result in additional extraction of the sediment,” explains Jasmin Sadikovic.
The Bankwatch and Euronatur report warns about an ambitious EU-funded Hungarian project that plans to improve the navigability of the Danube by dredging a navigable channel. The report states that the project has many risks that significantly outweigh the benefits, including the negative impact on 58 areas that provide high-quality drinking water and the extraction of riverbed material which will additionally decrease groundwater levels. Due to conflicting standpoints, a Strategic EIA procedure is currently pending.
In Serbia, where water transport is also a priority, restoration projects, although planned, haven’t even started yet.
Compromise solutions for these problems exist, but they are rarely included in the EU and national regulations, warn most of the conservation experts contacted for this article.
One of the mitigating measures should be, for example, ensuring that the amount of water sufficient for the maintenance of the ecosystem is always directed into the side channels instead of hydropower plant turbines. Although this so-called biological minimum is different depending on the area, in general it should be at least 10 per cent of the average flow.
“In practice, in many EU countries no one is monitoring whether plants respect this measure, so often the minimum is only 5 or even 2 per cent,” says Pusch.
The drastic fall in water levels, explains Denac, has turned the Slovenian part of the Drava river into an almost completely degraded river. But for the rest, mainly the Croatian part, there is still a chance if mitigating measures are applied.
Tibor Mikuska, however, warns that many of these protecting guidelines are not included in the recent Management plan for the Croatian Mura-Drava regional park – the protected area along Mura and Drava in Croatia – especially the ones regarding ongoing economic activities.
Echoing the opinion of many fellow ecologists, Arno Mohl thinks that more ambitious and large-scale restoration efforts and regulations are needed if the EU really wants to protect the damaged river ecosystem.
“Institutions in charge of water management have been accustomed to doing the same things for the last 40 years, but this business-as-usual doesn’t work anymore,” says Mohl. “They, too, need to adapt.”
This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.