Rhineside Story

On Friday October 10 this year, there was a sudden spurt of excitement on the banks of the River Rhine in the Swiss city of Basel. A 36-inch Atlantic salmon had just been caught by an amateur angler, Thomas Wanner, at the junction of the Rhine and its Birs tributary. As luck would have it, Olivier Schmidt, a hobby fisherman who is a curator at Basel’s Natural History Museum, was nearby. Schmidt took a photo with his cell phone before releasing the fish back into the river and jubilantly sent the picture to Switzerland’s Environment Ministry to confirm the identity of the salmon.

The salmon, which apparently had migrated 600 miles up the Rhine, was the first to be seen in this part of the Rhine in half a century. Considering that the salmon is the life- symbol of the Rhine, the sighting was considered a good omen for the entire 1,320 km-long river that runs through five countries after it rises in the Swiss Alps near Lake Constance and before it ends at the North Sea at Rotterdam in Holland.

“Every new sighting of salmon, which completely vanished from the Rhine by the 1950s because the river had turned into a toxic soup, is a thumbs-up for Rhine ecologists,” remarked biologist Anne Schulte Wuelver-Leidig, assistant managing director of the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine (ICPR), headquartered in Koblenz, Germany. “It means that the river is becoming ecologically sound again,” she added, pointing to the Rhine waters, shimmering silvery brown in the autumn light outside her office window.

The Rhine was dismissed as the “Sewer of Europe” in the 1970s due to decades of massive inputs of untreated wastewater from chemical and paper industries, pesticide-guzzling farms as well as domestic settlements plus ship oil spills (the Rhine carries more freight than any other river in Europe). Additionally, the construction of dikes and straightening the water course into a linear shipping line had resulted in the loss of more than 85% of former bank-biodiversity areas. Furthermore, 21 big hydroelectric plants had been built along the river, causing, among other problems, fish to vanish. Regional land reclamation, reckless construction, as well as flood protection structures had restricted the natural floodplains and shortened the river course by 90km, hugely increasing the risk of floods.

The ICPR, which recommends policies to the five Rhine countries- Switzerland, Germany, France, Luxembourg and Holland- was set up way back in 1950. However, it stepped up its efforts ferociously in 1986, after a big chemical spill from the Sandoz plant in Basel killed millions of fish for hundreds of km downstream.

“The Sandoz scare, which came just weeks after the Chernobyl catastrophe in Russia, enabled us to set stringent goals for the river under the ‘Rhine Action Plan for Ecological Rehabilitation’ in 1987,” explained Dr Wuelver-Leidig. “We could set tough targets because the Greens were very strong in Germany and Switzerland at the time.”

The three-phase, 15-year plan aimed at reviving the river by identifying and eliminating the main sources of pollution with a more active regimen of water-quality testing, pollution patrols to keep industry and communities honest, and steep penalties for polluters. Popularly known as the Salmon 2000 project, the plan promoted the idea that the Rhine is a total ecological system, a place where salmon, pike, perch, trout and other fish could thrive once more. In the late 1990s, the plan was renamed Salmon 2020 project because it required a couple more decades to achieve its targets.

But so strictly have its measures been implemented since 1987 that great improvements can be noticed now. “Today, oxygen levels are 100% in most parts of the Rhine system an achievement few experts expected 20 years ago,” Dr Wuelver-Leidig pointed out. “Pollutants like nitrogen compounds, lead, ammonium and phosphorus have been sharply reduced from the very high levels of the 1970s. The populations of shad, trout, sea bream and other fish are up although salmon have not really returned to the river only about 200 have been sighted in some parts since special breeding programmes were launched in the early 1990s.”

Among the cleansing measures to be taken was the installation of domestic wastewater treatment plants, which cover 96% of the 58-million population in the 200,000-sq km catchment region, and of pollution control systems. “It was a tremendous challenge and it cost nearly 25 billion euros, but it succeeded,” she added. Industries were compelled to install effluent control units and their emissions are strictly monitored all along the river by 57 monitoring stations located at various points between Basel in Switzerland and Andheim in Holland. Violators are stiffly penalized and their plants can even be closed down if the pollution problem is not sorted out within a very short period.

“An alarm is set off at the nearest monitoring station if there is an accidental spill and/or a release of effluents that contain chemical compounds that are above the permissible limit,” explained Klaus Lindner, a Cologne-based scientist with the International Association of Waterworks in the Rhine Catchment Area. “As soon as an alarm goes off, we check who the culprit is, what the problem is and how serious its impact is on the river. Emergency discussions are held to sort out the problem,” he added as we visit one such monitoring station, located on a barge on the Rhine in Cologne.

In addition to the 57 monitoring stations, there are seven ships anchored at different spots in the 800km long Rhine Shipping Lane to check and clean up after any oil spills from ships. “This service is currently being provided free of cost, but soon the shipping companies will have to pay for it themselves,” Lindner said.

Since 1995, the ICPR has also spent 4.5 billion euros on creating new floodplains in the Rhine delta in Holland and a few million euros on flood protection in flood-prone areas in Germany. “Natural draining grounds have been built upon recklessly or farmed intensively, and we need to free them up in order to bring down the flood risk levels,” explained Dr Wuelver-Leidig, “We offer fair compensation and alternative properties, but this programme is proceeding painfully slowly because, as you know, it is not easy to acquisition land from farmers and industries.”

In towns like Bonn and Cologne, which witnessed big floods in 1993 and 1995, local authorities have built and are continuing to build walls along some parts of the river to keep the floodwaters out, as Dr Carsten Schmidt showed me when we visited some villages in and around Cologne. And, in several towns including Cologne, Bonn and Basel, the old stone banks of the Rhine are being dismantled and natural banks are being created to loosen the river a bit as well as to improve eco-conditions for aquatic life. Basel has spent millions of Swiss francs on the programme over the last decade.

Many measures were taken also to bring the salmon back to the Rhine. A budget of 50 million euro was allotted for the purpose. Rhine ecologists lobbied (and continue to lobby) local hydropower stations to build sophisticated ‘fish passageways’ to allow the salmon to migrate from the sea to the river and from one section of the river to another. Salmon only spawn in the place where they started life, i.e. in a sandy-bedded branch of the river.

“In 1996, the first salmon to be caught in the river for decades was hooked just outside the Iffezheim dam near Strasbourg (France), 160km north of Basel. The fish came from the North Sea but because of the dam could not reach the branch where it was born,” explained Dr Daniel Kuery, a Basel-based ecologist whose company, Lifescience, has worked on Rhine restoration projects in Switzerland. “That is when the ICPR and the rest of us started fighting for fish passages to be built. It was not easy to convince power station owners to build salmon passes, but their resistance gradually broke down.”

The first salmon pass at Iffezheim was built in 2000 and another 20 km away at Gambsheim in Alsace in 2005 at a cost of 20 million euro. Another one at Strasbourg is under construction and will be commissioned by 2015. Three such passes were also created between 2001 and 2005 near Rotterdam in Holland so that the salmon could freely navigate the three arms of the Rhine there.

According to Dr Kuery, in all other power stations, studies are being conducted to devise how to facilitate fish migration both up- and downstream. “ICPR experts and local ecologists like us are trying to ensure that soon all the fish will be able to get past turbines and sluice-gates, unharmed.”

Some biological measures were also used to help bring back the salmon. Since 1991, nearly ten million salmon “fry” (very young salmon) have been released into the river. A local fishing club on the Sieg tributary near Bonn was the first to import salmon eggs from Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland and release salmon fry into the river. The successful experiment was replicated under scientific surveillance by fishery boards elsewhere along the river, including in Basel.

ICPR experts and other ecologists hope that by 2020 wild salmon will have returned to the river. “That is our target year for the complete rejuvenation of the Rhine. The next decade will be a struggle like the one before because the Rhine is, and will remain, a mainstay of commerce,” said Dr Wuelver-Leidig, “But, eventually, we hope to strike a comfortable compromise between economics and ecology.”

The story of the Rhine is a parable of hope. And lessons learned on the Rhine are now being applied to other historic salmon rivers, including the Elbe, shared by the Czech Republic and Germany, and the Oder, shared by Poland and Germany. These, in turn, are a model for river rejuvenation in other parts of the globecertainly for India, where the much-vaunted Ganga Action Plan has run into troubled waters and is in dire need of rescue.