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River restoration: 2025 marks a record year for dam removals in Europe
A new report by Dam Removal Europe confirms an 11 per cent increase in the removal of dams and river barriers — a trend that is also spreading beyond Europe.
River restoration is becoming an increasingly central policy in many European countries. According to the latest report by Dam Removal Europe, a coalition of environmental groups, as many as 603 dams, barriers, underground culverts and locks were removed during 2025 across 21 countries. In many cases these infrastructures had been abandoned, and their removal allowed 3,740 kilometers of rivers to be reconnected. For some countries, such as Iceland and North Macedonia, 2025 marked the year of the first-ever removal of artificial barriers along rivers, a development that goes hand in hand with a series of recent European laws on nature restoration. Restoring rivers to their free-flowing state is, in fact, a form of climate resilience, water security and biodiversity recovery. And even outside Europe — particularly in the United States — stories of dam removals are multiplying.
Fewer dams in Europe
Europe is freeing its rivers. As revealed by Dam Removal Europe’s 2025 report, 603 river barriers were removed over the course of the year. Fifty per cent of these were underground culverts, 31 per cent were weirs, while dams represented the second most common type of barrier removed, accounting for around 10 per cent, followed by floating wooden dams.
The report also highlights that 78 per cent of the removed barriers were less than two meters high, 20 per cent stood between two and five meters high, and 2 per cent exceeded five meters in height. Five per cent of the removed barriers were used, or had originally been built, for hydropower generation, although in many cases they had ceased functioning. Overall, this removal effort — spanning 21 European countries — allowed 3,740 kilometers of rivers to be reconnected and represented an 11 per cent increase compared to 2024, when 542 river barriers had been removed. Compared to 2020, the number of removals has increased sixfold.
Today there are around one million barriers interrupting European waterways, many of them obsolete. These infrastructures have a heavy environmental impact because altering river flows affects fish migration and the movement of other species, while often creating stagnant water conditions prone to pollution. The British newspaper The Guardian attributes to these barriers responsibility for the 75 per cent decline in Europe’s migratory freshwater fish populations since 1970. Precisely for this reason, awareness around the issue has grown strongly in recent years, so much so that in 2024 the European Union approved a new Nature Restoration Regulation which, among other things, sets the ambitious target of restoring 25,000 kilometers of rivers by 2030. The increase in dam and river barrier removals documented by Dam Removal Europe is a direct consequence of that regulation.
The first time for Iceland and North Macedonia
The removal of dams and river barriers could actually be more extensive than what Dam Removal Europe has recorded. As the coalition of environmental organizations points out, while countries such as Spain, Denmark, Estonia, Austria, Finland and Sweden have highly advanced monitoring systems, many other European countries still lack such tools. What is certain, however, is that removals remain relatively rare in southeastern Europe: only 1.3 per cent took place in that region.
Still, there is good news, because it was precisely in a southeastern European country that the first-ever removal occurred in 2025. It happened in North Macedonia, where the organization Eko-svest succeeded in removing two barriers, one on the Kriva River and another on the Pčinja River, reconnecting 72 kilometers of habitat. The first structure — 1.6 meters high and 10 meters long — was removed in a single day in August 2025, while work on the second took place from October to December 2025 at a total cost of 42,000 euros. As Dam Removal Europe explains, “the project reconnected critical habitats for more than ten native fish species, including Barbus balcanicus and Rhodeus meridionalis, while improving water quality and reducing flood risks and dangers for local communities.”
Moving to a completely different geographical area, another country also saw its first river barrier removal in 2025: Iceland. There, the removal of a dam on the Melsá River — originally built in 1958 to supply electricity to a local farm and long unused — reconnected 2.55 kilometers of upstream habitat and restored the river to a fully free-flowing state, safeguarding species such as sea trout and Atlantic salmon.
And outside Europe?
The European Union’s 2024 law gave momentum to river barrier removals, but it has also inspired national legislative initiatives. In March 2026, for example, Austria presented its first national plan for restoring river connectivity under that regulation, given that today only 12 per cent of the country’s rivers still flow freely.
Awareness on the issue is also growing outside Europe. In the United States — where an estimated 550,000 dams and 300,000 road barriers interrupt river systems — around one hundred dams were removed over the past year according to data from the organization American Rivers. In 2024, one of the most striking dismantling operations was completed on the Klamath River, where four dams were removed after they had drastically reduced salmon populations and deprived Indigenous peoples of their main source of livelihood. In China, meanwhile, some 300 dams have been demolished and numerous small hydropower plants shut down in recent years along a tributary of the Yangtze River as part of a local initiative to restore the ecosystem of Asia’s longest river and protect fish populations.
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