Look at the embankments of the Dâmbovița river in Bucharest.

Cold, grey concrete walls and known more for its pollution than its beauty, Dâmbovița seemed forgotten, lifeless even in summer.

This is Raluca's home town. She never saw people swimming or gathering along its banks.

The story is different in other Romanian rivers, like in the Danube, more active and alive.

Climate change is making Romania increasingly vulnerable to floods. 2025 saw fash floods and widespread damage.

In 2024 it happened as well in Poland, Spain and Germany.

Floods took away many lives. Flood damage costs billions of €.

What if there was a way to use rivers' natural features to prevent flooding?

We can prevent flood impacts if we understand rivers better

Rivers don’t just carry water from point A to point B. They meander, braid, shift, and carve landscapes.

This is how floodplains are formed.

Floodplains provide the space for the additional water to fill out, reduce floods peaks downstream and store sediments.

They also support diverse habitats including wetlands, lakes, and swamps

An example, these floodplains in the Parana river (Brazil)

#Floods

“In Europe, the picture of what a river should be has mostly disappeared” says Michael Bender of the Living Rivers Initiative, a nonprofit trying to save rivers across the EU

Wild rivers are free-flowing waterways without dams or significant human alterations

“We have few wild rivers remaining, like the Tagliamento in Italy and the Vjosa in Albania, but most of the time you see river banks made of concrete or stretched channels”

Michael Bender is on the left of the picture

In other parts of the world rivers are still seen as sacred, living beings.

In January 2025, Bender’s organisation brought members of the Nez Perce tribe from the United States to Europe to share their perspective.

For the Nez Perce, rivers aren’t resources to be managed: they’re living entities deserving respect.

The Vjosa River in #Albania is one of the largest free-flowing wild rivers in Europe.

In 2023, it was declared Europe’s first Wild River National Park.

But even the Vjosa is under threat. Ironically, it is being endangered by the very people coming to admire its wildness

Many people are coming by car. Visitors drink water from plastic bottles, which end up in the Vjosa river. There is no proper sewage system in place

“It should not be considered ecotourism if you fly to Albania, rent a car, drive through the valley, park your vehicle right next to the Vjosa, look at the Vjosa, while drinking from a plastic bottle.” - Ulrich Eichelmann (RiverWatch)

#Albania #Vjosa #Ecotourism

This fight isn’t limited to Albania. Across Europe, dam and dyke construction continues – isolating rivers, choking their ecosystems, and endangering the people who live near them.

There are at least 1.2 million instream barriers fragmenting Europe’s rivers.

These barriers include thousands of dams and a large network of low-head structures such as weirs, culverts, and ramps.

The picture shows what culverts are.

“Instead of flowing rivers, you have standing water”, Bender explains. “The sediments, stones and all else that the rivers carry gets stuck in the reservoirs.”

Riverbeds become smothered in mud. “And it makes it inhabitable for many species, including mussels, for instance. They just sink down in the mud and die”, Bender notes.

Even more frustrating: many of these barriers no longer serve a purpose.

The picture shows what sluices are.

Dykes and dams were created to feed water to mills, as ponds to grow fish, or to irrigate crops.

But 15% of these barriers are no longer used. That is a staggering 200,000 useless structures strangling Europe’s waterways.

There are increasing efforts to remove them. In 2024, 23 European countries took down 542 dams, culverts and sluices that had been blocking rivers

Picture of before/after the removal of a small dam, river Ibias (Spain), 2022. Cantabrian River Basin Authority.

Time to reconnect to our rivers

The Nature Restoration Law targets to restore 25,000 kilometres of rivers to a free-flowing state by 2030.

The Water Framework Directive requires “good status” for all water bodies, including rivers by 2027, meaning good chemical and ecological conditions, including healthy fish populations, aquatic plants, and physical river structure.

But policy decisions alone won’t be enough without a fundamental shift in our attitude and understanding toward rivers

In Estonia’s Soomaa National Park each year melting snow and rising waters from 4 rivers transform their landscape into a vast shallow lake, navigable only by canoe.

This “fifth season,” as locals call it, can last several weeks in late March and early April.

These natural floods affect daily activities, transportation, and the local economy, but also help to maintain and restore wetlands and support breeding grounds for water birds and fish.

The Soomaa inhabitants learned to live with this additional season, with an understanding of this natural phenomenon and with adjustments”, explains Ewa Leś, founder of the River University

The locals’ houses stand adapted to withstand the flooding, their lives attuned to nature’s rhythm.

Living with rivers won’t look the same everywhere. Not every European community will end up navigating by canoe through a fifth season.

But the principle remains: instead of fighting water with concrete barriers, we could work with it -preserving floodplains from development, allowing rivers to meander naturally, and maintaining free – flowing waters without dams.

The harmony in Soomaa reveals what we’ve lost. We are raising generations of Europeans who no longer understand their own landscapes, who see nature as something to be managed rather than partnered with.

Political responses to floods in EU countries are still focused on engineered solutions to control rivers rather than understanding and working with them.

After the 2024 floods, Austria approved a EUR 60 million package to renovate and expand dams and retention basins across several rivers

Still, there is a growing interest in nature-based solutions – like restoring natural river meanders, floodplains, and wetlands

Austria and Switzerland, for example, plan a EUR 2.1 billion flood protection project on the Rhine that blends riverbed restoration with engineered defenses. One key measure is widening the riverbed, transforming parts of the Rhine from a canal-like river to a natural watercourse.