The Regional Environmental Reconstruction Programme for South Eastern Europe REReP Record

Danube makes ‘endangered’ top 10 Dams, pollution and global warming and a host of other environmental threats have combined to earn Europe’s longest river the unenviable distinction of being one of the world’s 10 most-endangered rivers, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced on March 20, 2007. According to a WWF report, more than 80 percent of the original floodplain of the Danube and its tributaries has vanished since the early 1800s; meanwhile, poor management and ongoing construction are worsening the situation. The EUobserver cited the WWF as warning that the EU Trans-European Network for Transport also stands to place “valuable natural stretches” of the Danube at considerable risk to harm, one of which includes the middle and lower Danube in Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. “Further canalising results not only in loss of biodiversity and wetlands—thereby increasing problems with flood management—but can also draw down water tables, risking access to drinking water for 20 million people,” the WWF said. Danube spring flooding has regularly wrought disaster in recent years. And while efforts have been stepped up to offer better flood protection, experts expect that more than 85 percent of the river will fail to meet objectives of the EU Water Framework Directive, the aim of which is to achieve “good” status for all European waters by 2015, the EUobserver wrote. The Danube is Europe’s sole river in the WWF’s endangered top 10: The others are the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Ganges and Indus (all in Asia), Latin America’s La Plata and Rio Grande, Africa’s Nile, and Australia’s Murray-Darling.

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