Why Europe wants to tear down thousands of it’s dams

This story has nothing at all to do with surfing, but it has everything to do with water and the natural flow of things, so thats a good enough reason to post it eh?

SOURCE: NAT GEO – AUTHOR: REBECCA DZOMBAK:

Tore Sorebakken, a Norwegian fly fisherman, jokes that he has a new winter hobby: blowing up dams.

It’s not that he’s a comic book villain, set on destroying infrastructure. He’s part of a growing European effort to remove defunct dams and other barriers from rivers, driven in part by a piece of legislation from the European Union that calls for 25,000 kilometers, or about 15,500 miles, of rivers to be flowing freely by 2030.

Sorebakken’s latest target: A five-meter tall dam on a remote stretch of the Vinstra River, a tributary of the 127-mile long Gudbrandsdalslågen River that runs through the heart of Norway. The dam was constructed in the early 1900s to aid in timber transport and producing a pittance of hydropower, but it had been defunct for decades. And local authorities were unaware of its existence altogether. “They had forgotten and thought it was a natural waterfall,” Sorebakken says.

That made it a prime candidate for removal. So in December 2025, Sorebakken and a team of workers drained the reservoir, drilled dozens of holes in the concrete facade, and packed them with 750 kilos of explosives. There was a countdown. The ground shook, the concrete shot apart, and the water ran.

“It was nice to see,” Sorebakken says. And, he admits: “It’s always fun to blow things up.”

The E.U. legislation, called the Nature Restoration Regulation, is ambitious. The goal is to fix the ecosystem disruption that dams can cause, and to manage rivers more sustainably amid a changing climate while providing energy when and where it’s needed. It requires dozens of countries to coordinate the management of European rivers despite different authorities, cultures, and languages. And it comes at a time when many European countries are looking to grow their hydropower capacity—a process that requires dams.

But progress is underway. The law went into effect in 2024; that year, more than 500 barriers were removed from rivers across the continent. And another 600 more were removed in 2025, the nonprofit organization Dam Removal Europe reported on May 21. Iceland and North Macedonia also saw their first dam removals.

“This is a unique moment in history.” says Carlos Garcia de Leaniz, a river ecologist at the University of Vigo and Swansea University. “This has given us a mandate, a clear target, a clear objective.”

A DAM PROBLEM

Dams and other kinds of barriers on rivers, like weirs and even hardened riverbanks, can cause environmental problems. They can change a river’s flow, block fish and other animals from moving up and downstream, and create stagnant water that is easily polluted. 

“Free flowing rivers are full of life,” says Herman Wanningen, a river ecologist. “When you build dams, slowly, the river will die.”

There are at least 1.2 million dams and other barriers on Europe’s millions of miles of rivers constructed over hundreds of years. At least 150,000 of those are obsolete. They’re crumbling, inactive structures that clog up rivers and, in some cases, pose safety risks, like the dam Sorebakken targeted. 

Most dams in Europe were built around the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, followed by a burst of dam construction in the mid-1900s, as hydropower grew. Many of the 150,000 now-defunct dams were once associated with factories or small hydroelectric plants. Now, there are almost no European rivers that flow freely from source to sea, Garcia de Leaniz says.

THE RISE OF DAM REMOVALS

Resistance to dams grew throughout Europe in the 1980s, following the green revolution of the United States. in the 1970s. The first major dam removals in Europe were in the late 1990s, when France demolished three large hydropower dams. But momentum slowed as communities weighed the cost of removing dams versus the money that went into building them or ran into local opposition. Progress after that initial burst was piecemeal.

In 2014, Wanningen collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund to create Dam Removal Europe, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of and facilitating dam removals around the continent. He was motivated by the progress he had seen across the Atlantic. “In the U.S., many dams were being removed—big ones, small ones,” he says. “I thought, why are we not talking about this in Europe?”

Dam Removal Europe now organizes seminars around the continent, bringing in experts from the U.S. and elsewhere to share methods and effects of dam removals. The nonprofit also tracks dam removals around the continent. Through this work over the last decade, Wanningen has seen public interest and awareness of dam removals grow.

More than 9,000 dams and barriers have been removed from European rivers, with more than 6,700 falling after 2009. In 2020, Europe removed 100 dams in one year—the same number removed in the U.S. in 2025, as American Rivers recently reported. A few notable successes of the dam removal effort at large have made headlines over the years, including the nearly 500-foot-long Sindi Dam in Estonia demolished in 2019 and removals along the Varde River in Denmark.

Wanningen’s organization was not directly responsible for those projects, but he sees them as evidence of a growing movement. “Country by country, we’ve opened up discussions,” he says. “It’s like breaking down barriers in people’s minds, too.”

OPENING THE FLOODGATES

Mental barriers to dam removal are real. As in the U.S., dam removals in Europe can be controversial, raising fears of flooding, often unfounded, and other concerns.

“Nobody wants change,” says Anna Jivén, CEO of a Swedish foundation that funds dam assessments and removals in Sweden. But in her experience, “once it’s done and nature is coming back, everything gets smoother and people like it.”

There is a lot more to this story - FIND THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

 - AUTHOR: REBECCA DZOMBAK

 - SOURCE: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC