Industrial development once transformed the Rhine into a veritable wasteland.
Agricultural fertilisers are one of the river’s main pollution sources.
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A commission for
the Danube
The 2,857-kilometer Danube, Europe’s second-longest
river after the Volga, starts in Germany and irrigates Austria, Slovakia, Hungary,
Croatia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine
before flowing into the Black Sea.
After several unsuccessful attempts, a Danube Commission based on the Rhine model
was set up in Vienna in 1992. An international convention on cross-border pollution
and environmental preservation was signed in Sofia (Bulgaria) in 1994 and entered
into force four years later.
The Danube’s hydrographical basin stretches out over 817,000 square kilometers and
drains parts of a dozen countries. Some of them–Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Albania
and Macedonia–do not feel directly concerned and have not joined the Commission.
At the present time, the Danube is less polluted than the Rhine was in the 1970s.
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‘The
Basel disaster
enabled the ICPR to set higher goals in its 1987 Rhine Action Programme for Ecological
Rehabilitation’.
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An international
waterway
The Rhine
The Rhine flows down from two Alpine springs
in Switzerland’s Grisons region. One of them feeds the anterior Rhine (Vorderrhein),
the other the posterior Rhine (Hinterrhein). They converge at the Swiss village of
Reichenau to become the Alpine Rhine, which forms the border between Switzerland
and Austria before crossing Lake Constance. After the famous 25-metre-high Schaffhouse
Falls, the river becomes the High Rhine (Hochrhein) and flows west, where it demarcates
the border between Germany and Switzerland.
Downstream from Basel, the river turns north and becomes the Upper Rhine (Oberrhein)
for the next 300 kilometers or so. Then it briefly forms the border between Switzerland
and France and, for the next 180 kilometers, between France and Germany and, finally,
between several German states (Länder). At Mainz, the river turns west again,
then north at Bingen. This is the Middle Rhine (Mittelrhein), which crosses the Rhine
mountains for 100 kilometers.
At Bonn, the river becomes the Lower Rhine (Niederrhein), which, upon reaching the
Dutch border near Emmerich, turns west once more and splits up into several waterways
to form the Rhine Delta, into which the Meuse also flows.
From Reichenau to the North Sea, the Rhine is 1,320 kilometers long. The river’s
hydrographical basin stretches out over approximately 250,000 square kilometers that
are home to 51 million people and cover parts of Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France,
Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The Rhine’s many branches include the Aare in Switzerland,
the Ill in France, and the Kinzig, Neckar, Main, Lahn, Mosel, Ruhr, Lippe and smaller
tributaries in Germany.
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In
1996, the first salmon caught in the river for many years was hooked just before
the Iffezheim dam, near Baden-Baden
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Fish are once again swimming in
the Rhine River but it took an ecological catastrophe for the countries it flows
through to clean up their act
 For decades, the Rhine was one
of Europe’s most repelling waste dumps. Today, concerted efforts by all the countries
along its banks have restored the river’s health. The symbol of that recovery is
the mighty salmon, which swims once more in its waters: over 200 have been caught
since 1996. But the road to success was long and hard.
Europe’s busiest waterway, the Rhine is navigable over a distance of 883 kilometers
stretching from its source near Basel to its mouth in the Netherlands. For centuries,
many cities and major industrial areas, such as the Ruhr Valley, have occupied its
banks. One of the world’s densest road and railway networks follows its course. The
river also irrigates areas of intensive agriculture and vineyards producing highly-prized
wines.
Other crops, such as maize, tobacco, sugar beet and market garden produce (often
in greenhouses), which consume high amounts of fertiliser, are greater threats to
the environment. Run-off from dairy and pork farms also cause damage. Thousands of
people drink water drawn from the river, while urban waste flows into it. A glance
at the Rhine’s geography (see map and box) shows that civilisation puts huge strains
on the river, which flows through five countries, making it a prototype of co-operation
in international waters.
A
subject of treaties
An 1816 treaty,
one of Europe’s oldest, established the Rhine as a navigable waterway. The accord
was updated in Mainz in 1831 and replaced in 1868 by the Mannheim Act, which set
up the Strasbourg-based Central Commission of the Rhine, whose purpose was to guarantee
freedom of movement on the “international waterway.” Dikes were built along its branches
and marshland was dredged to make it navigable for vessels with draughts of up to
3,000 tonnes.
In 1885, five countries along the river signed an agreement of quite another sort,
the Salmon Treaty. The International Salmon Commission was set up to protect the
fish, which were vanishing from the river as a result of pollution and dams that
prevented them from migrating. Salmon swim out to sea when they are about 18 months
old and return to the place where they were born to spawn at the age of four or five
years. The countries along the Rhine decided to encourage the introduction of young
salmon into the river.
But during the nineteenth century, major civil engineering projects were built in
and around the river without any prior bilateral agreements. Decisions were taken
and work done which threatened neighbouring countries or towns further downstream.
In 1807, the Grand Duchy of Baden (stretching from Basel to Mannheim and later absorbed
into Wurtemburg) unilaterally decided to canalise part of the river. The German hydraulic
engineer in charge, Johann Tulla, straightened out its course, increasing the water
flow. Those “improvements” had a disastrous impact on the water table of the upper
Rhine plain, whose level fell. The softwood forests were no longer regularly flooded,
a feature of the river’s plain, and dried out.
Joining
forces against pollution
The Grand Canal
of Alsace, which France began in 1920, was also built without consulting neighbouring
countries. The decision was made by the victors of World War I as part of the Treaty
of Versailles. The canal enabled France to build 10 hydroelectric plants and dams
between Basel and Strasbourg, not to mention others on tributary rivers, which blocked
the movement of migratory fish. The waterway, which was widened in 1950, lowered
the level of the Rhine.
The river did not become Europe’s cesspit until the mid-twentieth century. Huge amounts
of liquid waste, mostly from towns, farms and expanding industries, were dumped into
the river with impunity. The level of phosphates from fertilisers and household products
such as detergents reached alarming levels. The fish population dwindled and in 1935
salmon vanished entirely. It was also increasingly difficult to draw drinkable water
from the river, and it often smelt like carbolic acid and tasted salty.
After World War II, most European states refused to negotiate with Germany. But,
unlike what happened in 1919, the idea of a joint effort to ensure the future of
the Rhine gained ground. In 1946, the Netherlands asked Switzerland to take part
in a discussion on pollution in the river.
The participants settled for a new international conference on salmon in Basel in
1948, when it was noted that the great fish really had disappeared from the Rhine.
The need to set up a permanent intergovernmental body to handle general pollution
issues then became clear and the International Commission for the Protection of the
Rhine (ICPR) was established on June 11, 1950 at a meeting of representatives from
the countries along the river (plus Luxembourg) that agreed to fund it.
The results were slow in coming. Water pollution steadily worsened for over 20 years.
But at least countries had decided to take regular samples of the Rhine’s water,
which led to a system to monitor water quality along the river’s entire length.
The
persistence of hard metals
In 1963, the
first draft agreement to clean up the Rhine was signed in Berne. The same year, the
ICPR was given a permanent headquarters, first in Lux-embourg and from 1964 in Koblenz.
Since then, a secretariat has collected and distributed valuable data on the river’s
condition and drafted progress reports on various ecological problems.
The Commission operates in a rather innovative way, which experience has proved to
be useful. Environment ministers and officials from each member state gather at ICPR
meetings on a regular basis. Decisions are taken jointly and each country, Land or
regional government adopts the ensuing measures. But neither the ICPR nor its secretariat
has any executive or coercive power to speak of, such as the authority to order the
construction of new facilities. Similarly, the Commission draws up environmental
projects for the Rhine, but if adopted they are funded and implemented by each member
country. The secretariat simply monitors their application along the river’s entire
length.
In 1976, the European Community (later the European Union) joined the ICPR, lending
it more authority, and subsequent measures began to show results. Between 1970 and
1974, the river’s oxygen content was still between only two and four milligrams per
litre–too low to support the growth of any organism.
But between 1970 and 1990, the countries along the river spent $38.5 billion on building
a string of purification plants. The oxygen level steadily rose and some of the river’s
biodiversity returned. However, experts noted that the purification plants did their
work after the pollution had occurred, limiting the effects without tackling the
causes. Furthermore, the plants could only eliminate a small amount of the heavy
metals in the water.
“The river has some ability to clean itself, but this has been over-estimated,” says
Anne Schulte-Wülwer-Leidig, a biologist in Koblenz. So the Rhine still contained
high amounts of heavy metals, such as mercury, cadmium and zinc, and harmful substances,
including polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs), benzene and atrasine (from pesticides).
In 1976, the ICPR member-countries signed a convention on chemicals that ranked some
as dangerous and put them on a “black” or a “grey list.” Maximum levels were set
for cadmium, mercury and other particularly harmful substances. Those steps were
taken at a time when manufacturers were able to acquire technology to eliminate or
separate out dangerous toxins during the production stage. Previously, they could
only be filtered out at the end.
That same year, the countries along the river signed an agreement on chlorides to
reduce the Rhine’s salt content from 500 to 200 milligrams per litre along the German-Dutch
border. The high level, which spoiled drinking water, was mainly due to waste from
potash mines in Alsace (slated for closing in 2004) and in Lorraine flushing into
the Rhine and the Moselle, as well as to chemical waste from plants along the river
Main. The salt level in the river Weser, polluted by potash discharges from the Werra,
sometimes reached 3,000 mg/litre.
People living along the Rhine were in for a terrible shock in November 1986 when
a fire broke out at the Sandoz chemical plant at Schweizerhalle, near Basel. The
water that firefighters used to put out the blaze flushed huge amounts of insecticides
and pesticides into the river, sparking an ecological catastrophe. Environmental
awareness rose and the affected population and their representatives demanded that
manufacturers take much tougher action against pollution.
“The Basel disaster enabled the ICPR to set higher goals in its 1987 Rhine Action
Programme for Ecological Rehabilitation,” says Koos Wieriks, of the ICPR secretariat.
Commitments were made to cut the amounts of the most hazardous pollutants in half
by 1995. Many experts thought this target could never be reached, but ICPR samples
showed that from 1985 to 1992, mercury in the river at the German town of Bimmen-Lobith,
near the Dutch border, fell from six to 3.2 tonnes, cadmium from nine to 5.9 tonnes,
zinc from 3,600 to 1,900 tonnes, atrasine from 10 to 3.7 tonnes and PCBs from 390
to 90 kilograms.
Special chemical purification plants were built up- and downstream from Schweizerhalle.
“The 1987 programme won credence for the idea that the Rhine was a total ecological
system,” says Schulte-Wülwer-Leidig. Under the programme, the Rhine was to become
a place where salmon, pike, perch, trout and other fish could thrive once more. But
to achieve that goal, the water quality had to be further improved, an objective
that was reached before the 2000 target date. Since 1991, more than a million young
fish have been released into the Rhine and its branches.
But the troubles of the migrating fish were not over. In 1996, the first salmon caught
in the river for many years was hooked just before the Iffezheim dam, near Baden-Baden.
The fish came from the North Sea but because of the dam could not reach the branch
where it was born. Salmon only spawn in the places where they started life.
With the help of ecology movements, the reluctance of power station owners to build
costly bridges or complex networks of passageways for the salmon is gradually breaking
down. Such facilities are already under construction at Iffezheim, at the confluence
with the river Ill (which has no dams on it), at a cost of about $6 million, and
at Gambsheim, in Alsace. Basel residents are being consulted about planned changes
in the landscape that would help the salmon migrate. Egon Oberacker, a professional
fisherman in the Swiss town of Nordbaden, is pleased that fish will be more plentiful
now. But, he says, “we still can’t live off fishing alone, as we once did.”
The idea of an integrated ecosystem that will enable a rich variety of animal and
plant life to thrive in the Rhine and its branches once more has come a long way.
In 1998, the ministers of the Commission set targets to restore natural areas as
part of a global ecosystem stretching from the mouth of the Rhine to the Jura, the
Alps, the Rhine mountain range, the old softwood forests of the floodplains, and
streams of the Rhineland-Palatinate, the Black Forest and the Vosges.
Meanwhile, not all the pollution problems have been solved. One of the most serious
is in the Rhine delta’s huge basin in the Netherlands, where toxin-filled mud dredged
from the port of Rotterdam has been dumped since the 1970s. Contamination levels
are falling now, but several of the old toxins in the river’s sediment are only very
slowly being eliminated. And all along the Rhine, the main source of pollution is
still farm fertilisers, which seep into the river every time it rains.
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The Tennessee precedent
One of the oldest interstate bodies set up
around a river is the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States. It was
created on May 18, 1933 by the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part
of the New Deal’s far-reaching public works programme. Since then, many federal and
local bodies have delegated authority to the TVA. The hydrological basin of the 1,600-kilometer-long
Tennessee River, a branch of the Ohio, drains sections of Virginia, North Carolina,
Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Those states and the federal government set various priorities when the TVA was set
up, including bringing the river’s erratic water levels under control to prevent
flooding, building a series of hydroelectric plants and bringing electricity to remote
areas. Twenty-one dams and six reservoirs were built. The entire system enabled the
growth and modernisation of farming and the reforestation of some areas.
Today, the TVA is considered an outstanding example of regional planning.
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