Along a river in South Karelia, something became possible again in 2025 for the first time in more than a century. Salmon swam upstream through the Hiitolanjoki, passing sections that three hydroelectric dams had made impassable. The dams were torn down between 2021 and 2023. By autumn 2022, biologists documented salmon fry in densities up to 400 per square meter. In 2025, Europe broke its own record for the fifth consecutive year in such barrier removals: 603 dams, weirs and fish passages removed, freeing 3,740 kilometers of river.
Six Times More Than 2020
When the Dam Removal Europe network first began counting continent-wide in 2020, around 100 barriers came down per year. Since then, the number has grown each year. In 2024, the figure stood at 542 removals. In 2025, it reached 603, eleven percent more than the previous year. In six years, the pace has increased six-fold. For the first time in 2025, 29 countries participated, now including Iceland and North Macedonia.
Sweden led with 173 removed structures, followed by Finland with 143 and Spain with 109. Most barriers are not imposing dams but old fish passages and weirs that once served forestry or mills and whose purpose has long since vanished. Chris Baker, director of Wetlands International Europe, calls such removals the largest available ecological quick wins. The barriers serve no purpose anymore but continue to cause damage. Approximately 1.2 million barriers still interrupt European rivers, with more than 150,000 considered obsolete.
Salmon in Waterways Closed for a Century
In North Macedonia, the Shuplji-Kamen barrier on the Pčinja River was removed in 2025, a 53-meter concrete structure that for over 70 years had blocked fish migration across roughly 70 kilometers upstream. Ten fish species, including the endemic Vardar bitterling, can now reach their historical habitats. In southern France, removal of a weir on a tributary of the Gave de Pau reopened spawning grounds for Atlantic salmon and the Pyrenean desman, a small aquatic mammal. Iceland conducted its first dam removal in its history in 2025.
According to Wetlands International, 42 percent of European freshwater fish species are considered threatened with extinction. For many species, river connectivity is not an improvement but a biological requirement. Without free passage through rivers, they cannot reproduce.
In Comparison: What River Restoration Can Achieve
The most thoroughly documented dam removal to date is along the Elwha River in Washington state. Between 2011 and 2014, two early 20th-century dams were removed. Within two and a half years, eight anadromous fish species returned. The trout population grew from approximately 3,000 to over 25,000, according to studies by the U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA Fisheries. More than 4,000 Chinook salmon were documented in the watershed by 2022.
Measured against Europe's broader picture, the progression is equally remarkable. From 2020 to 2025, annual removal numbers climbed from roughly 100 to 603. Since the EU Nature Restoration Regulation took effect in 2024, requiring at least 25,000 kilometers of free-flowing river by 2030, a single year connected 3,740 kilometers. That accounts for 15 percent of the overall goal.
What Stands in the Way
Meanwhile, more than 8,700 new hydroelectric power plants are in the planning stages across Europe, particularly in the Alps and the Balkans. According to the Riverwatch network, roughly 90 percent of these projects would generate minimal electricity while causing substantial ecosystem damage. River fragmentation, disrupted fish migration and halted sediment transport. These are the same damages that dam removal in other parts of Europe is working to reverse.
How the EU reconciles renewable energy expansion with restoration obligations remains unresolved in national implementation of the Nature Restoration Regulation.
21,000 Kilometers Needed by 2030
If the current pace of 3,740 kilometers per year holds, Europe would meet the 25,000-kilometer free-flowing river goal in 2031, one year too late. To fulfill the commitment by 2030, annual progress must increase roughly 70 percent, from 3,740 to approximately 6,300 kilometers. The Dam Removal Europe network calls this achievable. The stock of 150,000 obsolete barriers is large enough. The bottleneck lies in permitting procedures, national funding and political will.
Within the global Freshwater Challenge, 54 countries and the European Union committed to restoring a total of 300,000 kilometers of river worldwide by 2030 and rehabilitating 350 million hectares of wetlands. Europe's 3,740 kilometers from 2025 is a beginning.