A new report by Dam Removal Europe records an 11 percent increase in the removal of dams and river barriers. A trend that is also taking hold 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, no fewer than 603 dams, weirs, culverts and sluices were removed during 2025 across 21 countries. In many cases these were derelict structures, and their removal made it possible to reconnect 3,740 kilometres of rivers. For some countries, such as Iceland and North Macedonia, 2025 marked the year of their 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. Returning rivers to their free-flowing state is, in fact, a form of climate resilience, water security and biodiversity recovery. And beyond Europe too, particularly in the United States, stories of dam removal are multiplying.
Europe is freeing its rivers. As the Dam Removal Europe report for 2025 reveals, 603 river barriers were removed over the course of the year. 50 per cent of these were culverts, 31 per cent were weirs, while dams made up the second most common type of barrier removed, at around 10 per cent, followed by wooden log sluices.
The report also highlights that 78 per cent of the removed barriers were less than two metres tall, 20 per cent stood between two and five metres, and 2 per cent were over five metres high. 5 per cent of the removed barriers were used or originally built for hydroelectric power generation but had ceased functioning in many cases. Overall, this removal work across 21 European countries reconnected 3,740 kilometres of rivers and represents an 11 per cent increase compared to 2024, when the number of river barrier removals had stood at 542. Compared to 2020, the number of removals has increased sixfold.
Today, approximately one million barriers interrupt Europe's waterways, and many of these are obsolete. These structures carry a heavy environmental impact because the alteration of river courses affects the movement of fish and other animals and frequently creates stagnant water conditions at risk of pollution. The British newspaper The Guardian attributes to these barriers the responsibility for a 75 per cent decline in the continent's migratory freshwater fish populations since 1970. It is precisely for this reason that strong awareness on the issue has been growing in recent years, so much so that in 2024 the European Union approved a new Nature Restoration Regulation which includes, among other things, the ambitious target of restoring 25,000 kilometres of rivers by 2030. The growth in dam and river barrier removal certified by Dam Removal Europe is a direct consequence of this.
The removal of dams and river barriers may be even more widespread than Dam Removal Europe has been able to record. As the coalition of environmental groups points out, while some countries such as Spain, Denmark, Estonia, Austria, Finland and Sweden have state-of-the-art monitoring systems, many other European countries lack such tools entirely. What is certain, however, is that removals remain relatively rare in southeastern Europe: only 1.3 per cent took place in that region.
There is good news nonetheless, given that a country in that very region saw its first-ever removal in 2025. It happened in North Macedonia, where the organisation Eko-svest succeeded in removing two barriers — one on the Kriva river and one on the Pčinja river — freeing up 72 kilometres of habitat. The first, a structure 1.6 metres high and 10 metres long, was removed in a single day in August 2025, while work to remove the second took place between October and December 2025 at a total cost of 42,000 euros. As Dam Removal Europe notes, "the project reconnected critical habitat for more than ten native fish species, including Barbus balcanicus and Rhodeus meridionalis, while water quality was improved and flood risks and dangers to local communities were reduced."
Moving to an entirely different part of the map, there is another country where the first-ever removal of a river barrier took place in 2025. That country is Iceland, where the removal of a dam on the Melsá river — originally built in 1958 to supply electricity to a local farm and long since disused — made it possible to reconnect 2.55 kilometres of upstream habitat and rendered the river completely free-flowing, safeguarding species such as sea trout and Atlantic salmon.
The European Union's 2024 law gave fresh impetus to the removal of river barriers, but it has also served as a source of inspiration for national legislative initiatives. In March 2026, for example, Austria presented its first national plan for restoring river connectivity under that very regulation, given that today only 12 per cent of the country's rivers still flow freely.
Beyond Europe too, awareness of the issue is growing. In the United States, where an estimated 550,000 dams and 300,000 road barriers interrupt waterways, around one hundred dams were removed in the past year according to data from the organisation American Rivers. In 2024, one of the most remarkable dismantling operations had been completed, involving four dams on the Klamath river that had reduced salmon populations and deprived indigenous peoples of their primary means of subsistence. In China, meanwhile, as many as 300 dams have been demolished in recent years and numerous small hydroelectric plants along a tributary of the Yangtze river have been shut down, as part of a local initiative to restore the ecosystem of Asia's longest watercourse and save its fish populations.