Why Europe wants to tear down thousands of its dams

Tore Sorebakken, a Norwegian fly fisherman, jokes that he has a new winter hobby: blowing up dams.

It’s not that he’s a comic book villain, set on destroying infrastructure. He’s part of a growing European effort to remove defunct dams and other barriers from rivers, driven in part by a piece of legislation from the European Union that calls for 25,000 kilometers, or about 15,500 miles, of rivers to be flowing freely by 2030.

Sorebakken’s latest target: A five-meter tall dam on a remote stretch of the Vinstra River, a tributary of the 127-mile long Gudbrandsdalslågen River that runs through the heart of Norway. The dam was constructed in the early 1900s to aid in timber transport and producing a pittance of hydropower, but it had been defunct for decades. And local authorities were unaware of its existence altogether. “They had forgotten and thought it was a natural waterfall,” Sorebakken says.

That made it a prime candidate for removal. So in December 2025, Sorebakken and a team of workers drained the reservoir, drilled dozens of holes in the concrete facade, and packed them with 750 kilos of explosives. There was a countdown. The ground shook, the concrete shot apart, and the water ran.

“It was nice to see,” Sorebakken says. And, he admits: “It’s always fun to blow things up.”

The E.U. legislation, called the Nature Restoration Regulation, is ambitious. The goal is to fix the ecosystem disruption that dams can cause, and to manage rivers more sustainably amid a changing climate while providing energy when and where it’s needed. It requires dozens of countries to coordinate the management of European rivers despite different authorities, cultures, and languages. And it comes at a time when many European countries are looking to grow their hydropower capacity—a process that requires dams.

But progress is underway. The law went into effect in 2024; that year, more than 500 barriers were removed from rivers across the continent. And another 600 more were removed in 2025, the nonprofit organization Dam Removal Europe reported on May 21. Iceland and North Macedonia also saw their first dam removals.

“This is a unique moment in history.” says Carlos Garcia de Leaniz, a river ecologist at the University of Vigo and Swansea University. “This has given us a mandate, a clear target, a clear objective.”

A dam problem

Dams and other kinds of barriers on rivers, like weirs and even hardened riverbanks, can cause environmental problems. They can change a river’s flow, block fish and other animals from moving up and downstream, and create stagnant water that is easily polluted. 

“Free flowing rivers are full of life,” says Herman Wannigan, a Dutch fisherman and dam removal activist. “When you build dams, slowly, the river will die.”

There are at least 1.2 million dams and other barriers on Europe’s millions of miles of rivers constructed over hundreds of years. At least 150,000 of those are obsolete. They’re crumbling, inactive structures that clog up rivers and, in some cases, pose safety risks, like the dam Sorebakken targeted. 

Most dams in Europe were built around the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, followed by a burst of dam construction in the mid-1900s, as hydropower grew. Many of the 150,000 now-defunct dams were once associated with factories or small hydroelectric plants. Now, there are almost no European rivers that flow freely from source to sea, Garcia de Leaniz says.

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The rise of dam removals

Resistance to dams grew throughout Europe in the 1980s, following the green revolution of the United States. in the 1970s. The first major dam removals in Europe were in the late 1990s, when France demolished three large hydropower dams. But momentum slowed as communities weighed the cost of removing dams versus the money that went into building them or ran into local opposition. Progress after that initial burst was piecemeal.

In 2014, Wannigan collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund to create Dam Removal Europe, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of and facilitating dam removals around the continent. He was motivated by the progress he had seen across the Atlantic. “In the U.S., many dams were being removed—big ones, small ones,” he says. “I thought, why are we not talking about this in Europe?”

Dam Removal Europe now organizes seminars around the continent, bringing in experts from the U.S. and elsewhere to share methods and effects of dam removals. The nonprofit also tracks dam removals around the continent. Through this work over the last decade, Wannigan has seen public interest and awareness of dam removals grow.

More than 9,000 dams and barriers have been removed from European rivers, with more than 6,700 falling after 2009. In 2020, Europe removed 100 dams in one year—the same number removed in the U.S. in 2025, as American Rivers recently reported. A few notable successes of the dam removal effort at large have made headlines over the years, including the nearly 500-foot-long Sindi Dam in Estonia demolished in 2019 and removals along the Varde River in Denmark.

Wannigan’s organization was not directly responsible for those projects, but he sees them as evidence of a growing movement. “Country by country, we’ve opened up discussions,” he says. “It’s like breaking down barriers in people’s minds, too.”

Opening the floodgates

Mental barriers to dam removal are real. As in the U.S., dam removals in Europe can be controversial, raising fears of flooding, often unfounded, and other concerns. “Nobody wants change,” says Anna Jivén, CEO of a Swedish foundation that funds dam assessments and removals in Sweden. But in her experience, “once it’s done and nature is coming back, everything gets smoother and people like it.”

Pushback can be especially strong if officials didn’t adequately include local perspectives in the planning process. A large dam removal project in France in 2022, for instance, elicited ire from residents for that reason; some posted signs calling the officials treasonous for taking away their lake without asking.

And, Garcia de Leaniz notes, people might be tired of experts seemingly flip-flopping: Dams were touted as an energy solution of the future in the 1950s, and now they’re environmental evil. Scientists can share why the dam removal would be good, but it can be a hard story to sell to a frustrated public.

“People are fed up with being ‘made aware’ of the science,” Garcia de Leaniz says.

Free rivers vs. fuel freedom

Then there’s the question of hydropower. Dam removals are a classic case of green versus gray environmentalism: Should society have lush riverways or less dependence on fossil fuels?

It’s a particularly pressing conundrum given recent reports of Europe’s shrinking water storage and increasing threat from droughts.

Some countries already get a significant portion of their energy from hydropower. Sweden gets about half of its energy from hydropower, which provides a stable backbone to support more variable wind and solar power. For every country, it’s a question of finding the right balance.

“We can’t afford to lose too much power to environmental issues,” Jivén says. “We need the power, but we also need healthy waters.”

The European Union is looking to grow its hydropower capacity. Investors are eyeing the Balkans, with some 3,000 hydropower dams in the works, and some environmental organizations and scientists are concerned that Europe’s few remaining pristine rivers will be developed. They’re advocating that if dams must be built, they should be built in locations that would minimize impacts on the rivers—sections that are already heavily industrialized, or that are far enough upstream that it won’t fragment the river as much. Solar and wind power are options too.

Jivén points out that removing dams does not always have to come at the expense of hydropower generation. Some dams generate very little power, or none at all. Older dams can be replaced with newer, more efficient ones; a single new dam might replace three old ones, for instance.

“We all want the same thing,” Jivén says. “We need better ecosystems around the rivers, and we also need all the fossil fuel-free power production that we can have, more than ever.” 

Rivers divide, rivers unite

The dams removed in 2025 reconnected 3,740 kilometers (km) of river across the continent, Dam Removal Europe estimates. But there’s still a long way to go. With limited resources, a continental-scale effort to meet the 25,000 km goal will require international collaboration to find and prioritize the dams whose removal would open up the longest stretches of river, without sacrificing too much hydropower generation. 

“This is truly an international problem, and we should look at solutions from an international perspective as well,” Wannigan says. The nonprofit and its partners aim to bridge some of the gaps in strategy across borders and work with EU-funded programs to help countries meet the ambitious free-flowing goal by 2030.

Some clear strategies are already emerging. Barriers on rivers are often built in clusters, but some dams are more isolated, standing alone in the water. Finding and removing those more isolated barriers, whose removal would free up longer stretches of river, may be a good approach, Garcia de Leaniz says.

Some rivers can’t be reasonably expected to be returned to pristine condition. Societies need water for irrigation and hydropower, and many rivers today run through urban centers. Those rivers can certainly be helped ecologically, but Garcia de Leaniz suggests that dam removal efforts could prioritize rivers that are lightly modified. That would mean fewer dam removals are necessary to restore a river to a natural condition.

“Not all rivers can be made pristine, but all rivers can get better,” he says. 

Smaller dam removal projects driven by local activists like Sorebakken in Norway may have smaller impacts on the broader watershed, but those smaller projects are still worth doing, Garcia de Leaniz notes. “You have to start somewhere, and you have to start little by little,” he says. “The enthusiasm and the inspiration that the rivers can trigger in people is amazing.”

There’s a shared cultural heritage around the rivers of Europe that transcends time and borders. Long before they were dammed, the rivers were sources of water, food, and transport. They were connections to society as well as to the land. Now, some people are rediscovering that relationship—dams be damned.