TIRANA, Feb. 25 – A boom in the construction of hydroelectric dams in waterways of the region has lead to concern over the effects it will have on Balkan wildlife and waterways.
Albania in particular is at risk, according to an investigation by UK’s Guardian newspaper published this week. An environmental study by RiverWatch and Euronature said that over 2,000 dams have endangered the wildlife in the region, according to conservationists.
It criticized Western financial institutions for throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into building dams in the region, arguing that hydropower is a green energy source that offers poor countries a way out of energy insecurity.
“What we have here in the Balkans at the moment is a gold rush on the rivers,” says Ulrich Eichelmann, the director of RiverWatch, an Austria-based NGO. “I sometimes think the western countries that are financially supporting this degradation process have no idea what they are destroying. There is nothing in Europe remotely like this river system.”
“Scientifically we know more about some rivers in the Amazon than about the Vjosa,” Professor Fritz Schiemer of the University of Vienna told the Guardian. “We have very little knowledge about the biodiversity of the river ecosystem, and its ecological processes like sediment transport.”
The study says that eight sites are being sized up for dam development along the Vjosa by foreign companies, which the new Albanian government is privately resisting their approaches.
Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, told the Guardian that in his first six months in office, “I didn’t pass one day at work without someone calling or emailing me from Albania, Europe, or America, with this line: ‘We are interested in a hydropower plant development’.”
Energy Minister Damian Gjiknuri said that, “Everyone wants to build a hydropower plant in our country. It looks as if we will repeat the great harm done by building illegal houses with hydropower plants everywhere and in the end we’ll have no water for irrigation’.”
Across the Balkans, RiverWatch says it has evidence of 435 dams planned in Albania, 400 in Macedonia and Bulgaria each, 700 in Serbia, more than 100 in Bosnia and Hungary apiece, 70 in Montenegro and more than 50 in Slovenia.
In Albania, dam licenses already issued have an investment value of over 1.8 billion pound, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
Conservationists say that the planned dams bring roads, transmission lines, noise, industrial disturbance and an influx of human activity, likely to scare animals from the park – making them easy prey for poachers.
In Albania, about a third of energy is imported but the rest comes from hydropower, which is classified by the International Energy Agency think tank as renewable.
Albania’s energy ministry has put dozens of projects authorized in the last year on hold, but says that its hands are tied by fears of warding off foreign investment.
More than 200 projects approved under the previous government have been cancelled.
But Albania walks a thin line between preserving its beauty and economic needs, Rama told the newspaper.
The newspaper adds that “Balkan leaders such as Edi Rama say that a ‘huge investment’ is needed to protect the region’s rivers from environmental degradation. But of late, EU officials have been keener to push Tirana into clamping down on illegal cannabis growing than protecting its waterways.”
