x

Science

Balkan Activists Keep Fighting for Europe’s Last Wild Rivers

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — It took a decade of court battles and street protests, but Balkan activists fighting to protect some of Europe’s last wild rivers have scored an important conservation victory in Bosnia.

A new electricity law, which passed Thursday, bans the further construction of small hydroelectric power plants in the larger of Bosnia’s two semi-independent entities. Still, the new law only highlights the long road ahead to protect such rivers across the entire Balkans from being degraded, diverted and commercialized by people with connections to the region’s corruption-prone political elite.

“This is extraordinary. It will become the role model for other European countries, I am sure,” said Ulrich Eichelmann of the Vienna-based conservation group River Watch and coordinator of the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign to protect the entire network of wild Balkan rivers.

A caterpillar is seen by a small hydro power plant on the Zeljeznica river near the town of Trnovo, Saturday, July 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Eldar Emric)

Since it was launched in 2013, the campaign has brought together environmental activists, conservation groups and local people to jointly fight for protection of what it calls “one of the most important spots for European biodiversity.” It says the Balkans has over 28,000 kilometers (17,400 miles) of waterways in pristine or near-natural state, with “extensive gravel banks, untouched alluvial forests, deep gorges, spectacular waterfalls and even karstic underground rivers.”

Overall, more than 2,700 large and small hydropower plants are projected to be built on these Balkan rivers, including some inside national parks.

Bosnia alone has 244 rivers and had plans to build over 350 hydropower plants with the installed capacity of up to 10 mW — or more than one on every waterway.

“This whole business with small hydropower plants began some 15 years ago when investors started visiting villages and promising prosperity to the local people,” explained Lejla Kusturica, a prominent Bosnian river conservation activist.

In their telling, she added, “rivers were supposed to be prettified, we were supposed to generate significant quantities of clean electricity and local communities were promised it will all benefit them greatly.”

Instead, Kusturica said, investors begun trapping rivers and diverting them by pipe, taking away water used daily by locals and wildlife, eroding and degrading nearby forests.

Undeterred, the authorities offered investors public subsidies and fixed above-market prices for long-term contracts, arguing that this would help Bosnia reduce its dependence on coal and speed up its transition to renewable energy.

A view of the Buna river near the town of Blagaj, Bosnia, Monday, June 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Eldar Emric)

But following a construction boom that saw 110 small hydropower plants built in Bosnia, people from across the ethnically divided country begun arguing that these projects were in fact harmful for both the environment and their livelihoods.

Residents of Bosnia’s riverside villages and towns spontaneously started mobilizing against the small hydroelectric plants, documenting their destruction of nature, analyzing official statistics on their alleged economic contributions and launching court challenges against the permits authorities continued to issue for new projects.

The resistance included peaceful, at times months-long, sit-in protests on roads and bridges to prevent investors and their heavy machinery from accessing the rivers. At times, local authorities used violence to disperse the activists.

Still, a grassroots river protection movement gradually captured broad popular support in Bosnia and abroad, especially after it disclosed that numerous contracts for the commercial exploitation of rivers were awarded to the politically connected.

“People stood up against investors on their rivers. They were not knowledgeable people, they were no ecological experts or scientists, they were ordinary people that live next to a river,” Eichelmann said.

According to official data in Bosnia, painstakingly collected by activists, the owners of small Bosnian hydropower plants over the past decade have been raking in millions of euros in subsidies while paying minuscule concession fees, typically between 1% to 3% of their income.

In the meantime, the promised transition to renewable energy never really materialized. In 2021, Bosnia’s small hydropower plants contributed only just over 2.5% of the nation’s electricity.

The battle has been especially fierce along the Neretva River, a cool, emerald green 255-kilometer (158-mile) waterway that is a popular destination for rafters, fishermen and hikers. Before emptying into the Adriatic Sea in Croatia, the river and its tributaries run through both parts of Bosnia.

At first, stopping the commercial exploitation of Neretva and its tributaries, where 67 new small power plants were originally planned, appeared impossible, as it required deep knowledge of the different and sometimes conflicting laws in Bosnia’s two administrative parts.

But unlike any other issue in Bosnia since the end of its brutal 1992-95 war, the opposition to commercial exploitation of the free-flowing rivers has brought people of different ethnic backgrounds together. So far, the activists fighting for the Neretva River basin have stopped or delayed the construction of 56 hydropower plants.

While villagers were physically blocking access to the rivers for construction crews, teams of legal experts and scientists have been challenging those permits in the courts. In about a dozen cases, Bosnian courts said authorities had failed to uphold the requirement to consult with local communities, protect nature conservation areas and demand environmental impact studies from investors before consenting to their plans. The court said authorities also failed to properly inspect the construction and operation of the plants.

Activists were especially pleased to prevent the construction of two small hydropower plants at the confluence of the Buna and Neretva rivers, a stunningly beautiful conservation area that provides habitat for the soft mouth trout, a species endemic to the Western Balkans.

In numerous other cases, however, authorities allowed construction projects to proceed despite successful legal challenges.

Lawmakers in Bosnia’s other semi-autonomous part, Republika Srpska, responded to public pressure this year by halting subsidies for new plants with a capacity of over 150 kW, rather than with an outright ban. At the same time, some municipalities in Republika Srpska have distanced themselves from the small hydropower projects.

A scientist collects insects from water and surrounding vegetation on Neretva river near the village Ulog, Bosnia, Thursday, June 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Eldar Emric)

Yet even Thursday’s conservation win has its limits. The new electricity law gives existing concession holders three years to obtain necessary permits and the approval of local communities for their projects to proceed. This has sparked fears that the investors and local authorities will again find ways to bend the rules.

“We proved in court that this is a nature conservation area and that by law no construction is allowed here,” said Oliver Arapovic, 48, who spent eight years fighting to protect the confluence of Buna and Neretva rivers.

“We will use the protection of the law as much as possible, but if that fails, we are ready to defend this area, to block access to the investors and their heavy machinery with our own bodies,” he added.

His fellow-activist, 61-year-old Miroslav Barisic, was equally emphatic.

“Locals here are determined to fight to the end, even if it requires dying” for the cause, he said.

 

RELATED

AASUM, Denmark (AP) — In a village in central Denmark, archeologists made a landmark discovery that could hold important clues to the Viking era: a burial ground, containing some 50 “exceptionally well-preserved” skeletons.

herald

Top Stories

Columnists

A pregnant woman was driving in the HOV lane near Dallas.

General News

NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.

Video

Israeli Strike on Hospital Tent Camp Kills 4 and Ignites a Fire that Burns Dozens

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and triggered a fire that swept through a tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns, according to Palestinian medics.

BOSTON, MA – The Alpha Omega Council has announced its distinguished honorees for the 2024 Lifetime Achievement, Philhellene, and Emerging Leader awards to be presented at the anticipated annual Honors Gala November 2 at the InterContinental Boston.

NICOSIA - A memorandum of understanding for joint projects was signed between Cyprus’ Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy with the United Arab Emirates’s Khazna, that country’s biggest operator in the data sector.

WASHINGTON (AP) — With characteristic bravado, Donald Trump has vowed that if voters return him to the White House, “inflation will vanish completely.

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian man was rescued in the stormy Sea of Okhotsk after surviving for more than two months in a tiny inflatable boat that lost its engine, but his brother and nephew have died, officials said Tuesday.

espa

Enter your email address to subscribe

Provide your email address to subscribe. For e.g. [email protected]

You may unsubscribe at any time using the link in our newsletter.