The Danube: 2,860 kilometres of wetland - all under threat

By Stefan Korshak Nov 3, 2005, 13:44 GMT

Activists of Greenpeace sail past the Parliament building in Budapest on their ship \'Anna\' as they continue their campaign journey on the River Danube to promote the use of renewing energy resources in order to slow down climatic changes Monday, 18 July 2005. EPA/TAMAS KOVACS

Kiev - The ecological threats to the Danube stretch nearly its entire 2,860 kilometres, and are almost as varied as the countries the river runs through.

Hungarian environmentalists, for instance, are concerned about the hulking Gabcikovo Dam, built between Bratislava in Slovakia and Gyor in Hungary.

The dam began operation by 1992, despite massive protests and Hungary's departure from the project.

The floodplain forests of Gemenc in southern Hungary - a haven for storks, eagles and falcons - are particularly at risk, says Javor Benedek, a Protect the Future NGO spokesman.

Another Hungarian worry, Benedek says, is the ecological effect of dredging and bank control work required to upgrade the Danube to the European Union shipping standards.

'This work will require enormous interventions into the riverbed and it will endanger ecosystems,' he says. 'This is a major danger.'

Hungary's biggest Danube-related environmental problem, however, is water pollution - and the single biggest offender is Hungary's capital, dumping 85 per cent of all waste straight into the Danube without any treatment.

More than 30 million Europeans live close enough to the river for their waste to enter it, the Danube Commission estimates.

The list of industrial pollutants added by countries as the Danube flows south and east makes depressing reading: fertilisers, farm pesticides and manure, as well as discharge from smelters, paper mills, chemical plants and tanneries.

Serbia has all that and its own wrinkle: Poison in the Danube due to war. NATO air raids on the former Yugoslavia in 1999 destroyed electric transmission installations along the river, and the hulks during rising water still spill toxic liquids.

The worst blow was a 'surgical strike' against the Pancevo refinery near Belgrade, causing few casualties but releasing hundreds of tons of oil into the topsoil. Derivates seep into the Danube to this day.

The cost of cleaning up war damage will be more than 25 million dollars, and a half-decade after the bombing the money has not been found, the United Nations Environmental Programme reported.

Further downstream in Romania, human negligence and greed are culprits.

In January 2000 heavy rains caused tailing lagoons at the Aurul gold mines near Baia Mare Romania to overflow, washing 100,000 tons of cyanide-laced wastewater into a Danube tributary.

Cyanide concentrations were up to two hundred times safe levels as far as 700 kilometres downstream, according to Ukraine's Ministry of Ecology.

Six countries and the water supplies of 2.5 million people were affected by spills. Hungary alone disposed of 1,000 tonnes of poisoned fish.

At the end of the river, Romania and Ukraine are operating competing ship channels, with nature - in the form of the environmentally-sensitive Danube Delta - paying the price.

The Romanian channel, on the western Sulina branch of the delta, is kept open from silt by a series of Black Sea breakwaters at channel's exit into the Black Sea.

The breakwaters, built at an angle to the river's flow, carry away the silt and allow ships to pass into the river; but at the same time have changed the coast line and - according to environmentalists, flooded islands used by rare bird species for breeding.

The Ukrainian channel, on the eastern Bystriy branch, was finished last year and includes a man-made canal bypassing shallow waters where the Bystriy enters the sea.

The massive public works project, completed last year at an estimated cost of 200 million dollars, has been challenged in European courts - but Ukraine continues to operate the canal.

Constant dredging is necessary to keep the Bystriy open to ship.

The digging could be disastrous to the habitat, because much of the pollution dumped into the Danube upstream, comes to a rest in the Danube Delta's silt - until the dredger turns them over, according to a report by Ukraine's Institute of Geological Studies.

Austria offers one of the few environmental bright spots on the river.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Danube Steam Ship Company (DDSG) have formed an alliance to limit dredging depths, especially near Donau-Auen, where thousands of demonstrators the early 1980's blocked bulldozers and defied riot police to stop plans for a hydroelectricity plant.

The plant was never built, and a national park established in the region instead.