European Union Renewable Energy Goals: The False Promise of Hydropower and the Rights of Rivers in the Balkans
By Mia Blacklaws, Elena Tiedens, Charlotte Dent, and Una Šverko
Unsplash, credit: Nkululeko Mayiyane @nkuleesparx
In light of increasingly stringent global and European renewable energy targets set to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, the value to be found in clean or renewable energy sources is greater than ever. One common “renewable” energy source is hydropower, which uses a turbine to convert the power of water into energy as it journeys from higher to lower elevations.
Energy agencies, international actors, and institutions adopt a romantic narrative in reporting on hydropower, emphasizing its cost-effectiveness and sustainability, as well as its ancient usage dating back to primordial societies. A closer examination of hydropower, however, reveals that, despite its reputation as a renewable energy source, the permanent and devastating impacts of dams on rivers are far from sustainable.
While dammed rivers may retain a continuous flow, the watersheds themselves suffer irreparable harm. Furthermore, climate change and excessive water diversions threaten to diminish the flows of waterways, resulting in an uncertain future for many dams. Numerous dams and reservoirs also release large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. These issues raise important questions about whether hydropower should still be classified as “renewable” alongside other energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal.
From a European energy policy perspective, the rationale for large-scale implementation of hydropower is understandable. Using the kinetic energy of one of nature’s most abundant elements to produce electricity could provide significant benefits. It is thus no surprise that the European Union (EU) urges member states to invest in hydroelectric plants, with hydropower accounting for 29.9 percent of the EU’s renewable electricity production in 2022. Yet widespread belief in hydropower as a truly green source, paired with political and economic schemes that promote the development of hydropower infrastructures, have created a perfect storm that conceals the reality of hydropower-driven harms to the environment.
Although the problem of hydropower is of a global scale, the analysis at hand is geographically narrowed to the greater European region, particularly with an eye to the recent expansion of small hydroelectric plants in the Balkans.
Ecological and Environmental Impact of Large Hydropower Plants
Although the primary energy generation of hydropower is carbon free, upon further life cycle assessment, large-scale environmental destruction becomes evident, including increased greenhouse gas emissions, as well as ecosystem and species decimation.
Scientific scholarship has already acknowledged the environmental problems wrought by large hydropower dams and reservoirs. The large-scale reservoirs created by damming produce breeding grounds for carbon dioxide and methane as local vegetation decomposes underwater. Methane is of particular concern, as it is 80 times more potent in its contribution to global warming than carbon dioxide.
In addition to contributing to global carbon emissions, environmental impact assessments warn that large hydropower plants can significantly alter ecosystems, leading to habitat fragmentation, reducing biodiversity, and morphing natural river patterns. Large hydropower plants also cause changes across the watershed as the effects of a hydropower plant trickle down to large and small-scale rivers throughout a given region. The consequences of any type of hydropower plant include, and are not limited to, the following:
alterations of riverine patterns
disruption of species migration patterns
changes to sediment dynamics
barriers to natural river movements
chemical fluctuations
The severity of this issue is only highlighted by the sheer scope of dams across the world—60 percent of the world’s largest river systems are fragmented by dams. Thus, the World Commission on Dams and the International Rivers Network condemn the unchecked expansion of large hydropower projects because of their serious ecological and social impacts.
In addition to causing ecological destruction and harm to species, large dams displace human communities and lifeways. The International Rivers Network holds that “hydropower is almost always a component of the biggest dams that have displaced the most people and have the greatest environmental impacts.” Large hydropower infrastructure, including dams and reservoirs, have serious environmental and social implications, from increasing carbon and methane emissions to habitat fragmentation, species decimation, and human displacement.
Ecological and Environmental Impact of Small Hydropower Plants
Although many environmental groups and actors have begun to recognize the ecological devastation wrought by large hydropower plants, governments have continued to incentivize the construction of small hydroelectric plants. These policies ignore the shared environmental impacts of both classes of hydropower plants.
Defined by the International Energy Agency as plants with less than a 10 megawatt capacity, small hydropower plants are frequently viewed as having greater potential to provide energy while having a low environmental impact, in part because these plants do not always involve the dams or reservoirs of larger plants. Nonetheless, small hydropower alters water temperature, flow and sediment regimes, channel hydromorphology, and river connectivity, which all impact freshwater biodiversity.
As small hydropower plants produce tiny amounts of electricity, they are often built in a series of cascades along river stretches. In this way, they turn free-flowing rivers into a series of impoundments and dried river beds, thereby disrupting river ecology, and particularly disturbing migratory species. Their impact on fragile natural river systems, often in the smaller upper stream catchments where endemic species have adapted to highly specific habitats, can be equivalent to or even greater than large dams.
The EU and the Development of Small Hydropower in the Balkans
Map of 50 megawatt or smaller operating (brown), planned (red), and under construction (yellow) dams in the Balkans. Click the map or following text to visit Save the Blue Heart of Europe’s interactive version of this map.
Since the early 2000s, the European Union has incentivized the development of these small hydropower plants across Europe and in the Balkans—notably, a region home to the last free-flowing rivers in Europe. In the Balkans and across Europe, EU energy policy has continually had adverse effects on riparian ecosystems.
In 2006, when many of the Balkan nations joined the EU’s Energy Community, the EU began its involvement in the energy economies of southeastern Europe. The EU Energy Community requires that member states conform to EU directives and guidelines on energy and the environment, and in return, it gives states access to EU and international funding for renewable energy, including hydropower.
As members of the Energy Community, Balkan states have adjusted their policies to conform with EU energy directives dating back to the first EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED I) in 2009. RED I set Europe to achieve carbon neutrality by dictating the guidelines for a renewable energy transition across Europe—defining renewable energy to include, among other sources, hydropower.
In response, Balkan members of the Energy Community created nationalized fiscal incentives for the development of “renewable” and hydroelectric infrastructure. In the past decade, these incentives have mostly come in the form of feed-in tariffs (paying producers for electricity they feed-in to the grid) in which governments buy electricity from renewable and hydro energy developers at above-market rates. Journalist Dina Djordjevic argues that beyond the negative environmental effects of small hydroelectric plants, feed-in tariffs are particularly damaging to the environment because they disincentivize energy efficiency as developers receive money from the state no matter the productivity of the plant.
And indeed, the State Aid for Environmental Protection and Energy Guidelines, adopted by the European Commission in 2014, favors free-market auctions for renewable development programs over feed-in tariffs. Even though the commission hoped the systematization of auctions would further the efficiency of renewable energy projects in the Balkans and elsewhere, auctions have still primarily favored energy-inefficient and ecologically-destructive small hydroelectric plants. For instance, though the guidelines describe any renewable source as eligible for subsidies, in the Balkans, 70 percent of feed-in tariffs go to small hydroelectric projects. Even in Albania, where there has been the most significant shift to auctioning, fiscal incentives still most benefit small hydroelectric plants between 2 and 15 MW.
In sum, since the entrance of the Balkans into the EU Energy Community in 2006, the EU has propelled nationalized incentives that have led to an incredible expansion of small hydroelectric power into the Balkans.
The birth of hydropower in the so-called “Blue Heart of Europe” has done immeasurable damage to some of the region’s last intact riparian ecosystems in Europe. In 2017, the European NGO Riverwatch announced that 49 percent of all planned hydropower projects in the greater Balkan region fell within protected natural areas. Even when located outside of protected ecosystems, small hydropower plants can decimate fish populations as well as threaten the habitats of numerous other riparian species. Moreover, the comparatively small energy outputs of small hydroelectric plants mean net carbon savings are minimal and therefore raise questions of efficiency of this energy source when compared to other region-suitable alternatives, such as wind and solar.
2023 EU Renewable Energy Directive
In a tempered recognition of the environmental harms of hydropower, the 2023 EU Directive on Renewable Energy (RED III) includes hydropower in its list of renewable energies but implements standards to restrict its environmental damage. Notably, RED III allows member states to independently classify hydropower as a non-renewable energy source. However, this is an option that few Balkan countries have taken as they continue to incentivize the construction of small hydroelectric plants as renewable energy. Additionally, RED III forces all proposed hydroelectric plants to undergo Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and prohibits construction in Natura 2000 environmental protection sites (a network of protected areas in the EU, originally established in 1992). However, not only do few Balkan hydroelectric plants actually undergo the requisite EIAs, but Nature 2000 protection sites do not sufficiently represent Europe’s biodiversity and neglect the intrinsic value of non-designated ecosystems. Although RED III makes progress in mandating EIAs and restricting the construction of small hydroelectric plants in Natura 2000 protected sites, small hydroelectric plants fragment ecosystems and decimate species nearly everywhere they are built.
In the Balkans, the limitations of RED III are abundantly clear as small hydroelectric plants have continued to cut across the Blue Heart of Europe even after the passage of the directive. In fact, Kosovo is the only Balkan country to have phased out new hydropower completely, instead relying on wind power, solar power, and to a lesser extent, biomass to reach its renewable energy goals. Other countries have continued to build hydropower plants, often without the EIAs mandated in the RED III. As of June 2024, Montenegro and Serbia do not require sufficient environmental screening for hydropower plants under 1 MW and 2 MW respectively. In North Macedonia the situation is even worse, with power plants under 10 MW not undergoing sufficient EIAs. Further violating the RED III, only Montenegro has legal mechanisms for enforcing “environmental liability,” which ensures accountability for environmentally destructive energy projects. No such clauses exist in other Balkan countries.
These poor legal practices have allowed for the construction of even more damaging hydropower plants since the passage of the RED III in 2023. In March 2024, Bosnia and Serbia announced plans to jointly construct the new hydroelectric plant Buk Bijela on the Drina River, despite environmental objections from Montenegro. In 2004, a nearly identical plan was rejected after the Montenegro Declaration on the Protection of the Tara River and a 2005 UNESCO report that also urged against the construction of hydroelectric plants to preserve the region. Although this project would stand to do immeasurable harm to ecosystems along the Drina and Tara Rivers and the Durmitor National Park, it is only one of the 3,000 new hydropower plants planned in the Balkans as of summer 2023. Thus, Balkan rivers remain under threat even since 2023’s RED III.
Earth Law Center and our partners in the Balkans have continued our campaign to urge the EU to reclassify hydropower, including small hydroelectric plants, as a non-renewable energy. There is no environmentally benign form of hydropower, and to protect the Balkan Blue Heart of Europe and the rights of other riparian ecosystems across the world, the EU and other jurisdictions must prevent states from using hydropower to meet renewable energy targets.
Rights of Rivers
To truly defend vulnerable riparian ecosystems, a legal paradigm shift is warranted. ELC advocates for a redefinition of rights-holding subjects to allow for not only human beings and corporations but natural beings, from rivers to animals, to hold legal rights. Although there is no existing EU legislation that provides for the rights of free-flowing rivers, the reclassification of hydropower as a non-renewable energy has the potential to catalyze a broader legal reckoning with the rights of rivers in the EU, and if fully embodied, to protect other rivers from the existential harms of hydropower and other exploitative projects. For this reason, ELC’s work, and its partnerships with Save the World’s Rivers, Earth Thrive, Defensa Ambiental, and many others, are vital in establishing rivers’ intrinsic rights to protection.
ELC’s Universal Declaration of River Rights represents a significant move toward ingraining the intrinsic rights of rivers into international laws and public consciousness. Owing to the incredible significance of rivers as lifelines to human and non-human communities alike, the Declaration endows rivers with the right to flow within healthy ecosystems and watersheds. Not only have individuals and organizations increasingly embraced the rights of rivers as a balm to global environmental destruction but the rights of rivers have also been enshrined in national laws. The Atrato River in Colombia, the Whanganui in New Zealand, the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers in India, and many more rivers across the globe have their rights preserved in their respective national legislatures, ensuring that they can flow free from pollution and obstructions like hydroelectric power plants.
In fact, rights of rivers clauses in multiple jurisdictions have been successful in protecting rivers from the damaging effects of hydropower stations. For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia granted the country’s Cauca River legal rights in 2019, thereby preventing the construction of the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam, which would have transected the river and undermined its natural riparian ecosystem. Similarly, the Indigenous Maori serve as guardians to New Zealand’s Whanganui River, protecting the river on an ad hoc basis from a variety of threats, including the construction of hydroelectric plants. A variety of legal structures, from constitutional amendments to case law and guardianship regimes, have been effective in preventing hydroelectric power from carving through river ecosystems. ELC is working with our partners across the Balkans and the EU to honor the inherent rights of rivers and reclassify hydropower as a non-renewable energy in EU energy policy, with the intention of shifting the dial toward investment in true sources of renewable energy like wind and solar.
Conclusion
Although decarbonization is essential to addressing the ongoing climate crisis, hydropower is a false solution. Hydropower is not the basis for a renewable energy regime but rather yet another source of energy that will decimate the world’s ecosystems. Earth Law Center embraces the revolutionary movement to recognize the intrinsic rights of nature. This energy paradigm will allow non-humans their rights to exist free from the bounds of energy captivity.
