The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Time to tear down these harmful dams to restore free-flowing rivers full of fish
Bets don’t come much safer than this: I bet that your weekend reading did not include the annual report for 2021 of Dam Removal Europe. Funny you should ask, but yes, it was on mine.
This was after I read about the invention of a piece of kit that will monitor the effect on sea mammals of new tidal energy projects off Scottish coasts.
Dam Removal Europe’s annual report generated more publicity than normal (“normal” being not a lot) because last year it broke a record – the removal of 239 barriers including dams and weirs from rivers in 17 European countries.
Why is this good news? Because, in the words of the director of the World Fish Migration Foundation, “an increasing number of governments, NGOs, companies and communities are understanding the importance of halting and reversing nature loss, and buying into the fact that dam removal is a river-restoration tool that boosts biodiversity and enhances climate resilience.”
There were other headlines in the report. Of the 239 impediments to free-flowing rivers, 108 were in Spain. Allied to its successes with restoring the fortunes of the Iberian lynx and an enlightened approach to wolf conservation that is as heartening as it is rare, Spain is setting uncompromising examples in championing nature’s cause from which Scotland could learn a lot.
Finland shut down an operating hydro plant and its dam was dismantled because the environmental benefits were judged to outweigh the worth of the energy produced.
And how did Britain perform in Europe’s record-breaking dam removal year? It removed 10. Could do better.
The scale of the problem is considerable. In the rivers of Europe there are more than one million man-made barriers, 150,000 are obsolete and most of these are not maintained and deteriorating – and as they deteriorate, they pollute the rivers and compound the problem. Unlike dams built by beavers, which are porous so small fish can get through them and low enough for adult fish to jump over them.
They also improve river quality by acting like a sink that catches and breaks down impurities and they are biodegradable, so that when the beavers move away eventually, they foster new wetlands and enhance the local ecology.
Simple really.
The World Fish Migration Foundation summed up the report findings: “Dam removal is the most efficient tool to restore free-flowing rivers full of fish. This too should be implemented everywhere in
Europe, starting with the old and obsolete barriers with no economic function.”
Scotland’s hydro power revolution began the better part of 100 years ago, so it’s a reasonable assumption that we have more than our share of obsolete dams. Given that hydro power produces just 17% of renewable energy in Scotland and that a thoughtful and rigorously enforced energy conservation policy could save at least twice that amount, is it time to reconsider the value of hydro in Scotland and set that against the environmental benefits of freeflowing rivers?
We learned from John Muir more than 100 years ago that when we try and isolate anything on this Earth, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Freeflowing rivers full of healthy fish transform countless other lives too, from seals at the firths to otters and eagles and ourselves, for we too are entitled to our share of wild fish – our share, mind you and only our share.
The point is that the most efficient way to provide the amount of energy we need,
rather than the amount we need plus the amount we needlessly squander, is not necessarily a quest for the cheapest solution but the one that works best for nature. And if we learn to treat ourselves as nature rather than as a superior being above and beyond nature, then the quest becomes more complex and demands that we consider the consequences of what we choose.
Likewise, St Andrews University has been at the forefront of developing that technology that will consider the consequences of tidal power on sea mammals and show us how we can mitigate them so that our new demands on the ocean do not also impose unreasonable new demands on what lives there.
At the heart of all of this is one essential truth. We have to learn to rein ourselves in.
We have to do that as human beings and we have to do that for nature. Much of the crisis that we have brought to bear on the planet in the forms of climate chaos, a warming ocean, the unfreezing of the
poles, the death of glaciers, the extinction of a million species… all that is the direct result of our vast capacity for waste. To demand what we don’t need.
Robert Burns knew that essential truth when he apologised to all nature in the guise of a mouse for the fact that humankind had “broken nature’s social union”.
Nature’s social union… it is a beautiful concept and in Burns’ poem it was the very first high profile utterance of the idea we now call conservation. Nature’s social union… we broke it, we must fix it.
We have to learn to rein ourselves in