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| (Zarris on stage, Photo by M. Gaethlich) |
River Conservation Actions: National AMBER meeting in Athens
May 8th 2019
This was the first-ever meeting to deploy the concept of river barrier and dam removal in Greece! It was organized by the AMBER consortium (Adaptive Management of Barriers in European River, an EU supported H2020 project). The meeting was supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy and HCMR. And it was tightly focused on the issue of barriers, river engineering to mitigate and restore rivers.
I came away from this with a lot of good knowledge, and also some pain: some brief inflection points here:
-We really need to focus on barriers in Greece, we circulated a questionnaire and are working with a PhD student on this issue, but its really just a beginning for Greece.
- Greece is focusing on "routine monitoring" in rivers but it is largely neglecting active measures for river restoration and practical conservation at both the basin and the river water body level. Neglecting restoration work such as barrier issues is a serious gap in our obligations in the WFD process and a serious missed opportunity for conservation of globally threatened species and ecosystems. Please see a review of ours on this here:
River_and_Wetland_Restoration_in_Greece_Lessons
-Greece has no experience in barrier removal while other EU states are moving fast ahead-despite the economic recession and very serious EU complications (...and this includes Spain and Portugal). We have not even thought-out this issue and have not even reviewed the potential impacts of barriers on the biota in a general sense in this country. Greece has not removed a single longitudinal barrier or dam ever... (even Cyprus has revolved on small weir within its restoration measures in the WFD context). There are several situations that we know of where we have old and useless barriers (small weirs, anti-erosion barriers, old retention dams) that could be assessed for removal in Greece.
-Greece is remarkably behind in completed or well-developed Nature-Based Solutions and re-wilding of urban and peri-urban streams and rivers. (By 'behind' I mean "really-way-behind" the rest of Europe - not just the EU Med states). This saddens me. And it is sad that we are missing opportunities in peri-urban situations around Athens where we are wasting hundreds of millions of Euros on anachronistic and nature-destructive projects for anti-flood works (i.e. Rafina's Megalo Rema, Erasinos Stream in the Vravrona Natura 2000 site, the Podoniftis stream in the Kifissos basin). This is a scandallous situation that must be re-examined by scientist, engineers, policy-makers, politicians and other stakeholders.
- In Greece we are still not experienced at building a healthy conversation about dams and barreirs. Some colleagues are easy at promoting controversy and not prone to discuss openly the real needs for mitigation measures (and the feasibility and management aspects of this). Polorization and "extremes" dominate many silly arguments. Speaking for myself, as a researcher who was worked in many arid/semi-arid countries in the Med and the Middle East, I know that dams are "needed", no doubt, no one can be against "all dams"... But: how to manage dams and barriers? and where to place them? and even the potential for removing some useless dams and barriers is what I would like to a talk more about.
-Removing barriers (including dams) and doing ecological restoration gives new opportunities for major engineering works and allows environmentalists to work closely with creative planners and river engineers. In 2015, my friend K.G.Papaconstantinou made a case of a new agenda needed for river engineering through ecological restoration in Greece, the piece he wrote is timely...(Greek readers please see p. 58 here:
EU_Directive_200060_and_the_conservation_of_inland_waters)
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Finally, please see the PDFs of the 8 speakers of this meeting here:
workshop-river-conservation-actions-national-amber-meeting
I want to thank the following HCMR people for supporting this initiative and helping me in its set-up in Athens: Christina Papadaki, Aimilia Panagiotou, Haris Vavalidis, Giannis Kapakos, Angeliki Mentzafou and Elias Dimitriou. From the Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy I would like to thank Ioannis Mitsopoulos for his time and effort in helping this happen here.
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| Prof. Andreas Eftstratiadis from NTUA opened the first session with a well-documented over-view. |
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| The fish-pass engineer and Dam-good organizaer, Mrs. Pao Fernández Garrido of the World Fish Migration Foundation. She organized the meeting from start to finish! |
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| Dr. Argyrios Sapounidis from the Hellenic Agricultural Organization -Demetra gave us a well-illustrated case-study from the Nestos. |
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| My long-time friend Dr. Jose Maria Santos from Instituto Superior de Agronomia of Lisbon gave us one of the best fish-pass state-of-the-art stories ever! |
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| Dr. Dimitris Zarris who studied at the National Technical University of Athens and is also working on conservation issues in Attika gave an excellent overview of our urban stream problems. |
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| From Dimitris Zarris slides: the main problems in Attika.... |
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| From my presentation: I was lucky to be speaking to a nearly full-house on this very important topic! |
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| From J.M. Santos' slides of the new-age fish passes in Portugal... |
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| Our warmest thanks to the Ministry for hosting us and especialy to Ioannis Mitsopoulos who set the stage for us. |
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| Post-workshop 'field trip' to the karstic hills of Athens with star professors and researchers: Marta González del Tánago (Polytechnic University of Madrid), Piotr Parasiewics (Sakowicz Inland Fisheries Institute, Poland) and Diego Garcia de Jalon (Polytechnic University of Madrid) and Yours! |
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| Post-workshop meeting down at our Research Institute at HCMR Anavyssos with friends from North Macedonia: Dusica Ilik-Boeva and Zoran Spirkovski. I guess these are two of the first visitors to visit our government institute after the Prespa Agreement and the changing of the name of their country. A good beginning I hope... |
