Troubled Waters: Albania’s Wild River ‘Protected Only on Paper’

Only a few metres behind a huge construction site in Tepelena, one of the towns in southern Albania through which the Vjosa River flows, rises a mountain of waste. For a long time, this area has been used as a landfill. In 2023, Albania’s government declared the Vjosa – one of the last truly wild rivers in Europe – a national park, the only wild river national park in Europe. Close to the dump, a new “multi-functional” visitors’ centre, a project approved by Prime Minister Edi Rama, is now being built. “The multifunctional centre will serve as the heart of the project, offering … educational exhibitions and spaces for community engagement. Its design will prioritize accessibility and sustainability, transforming a degraded space into a vibrant cultural community,” the project plan says, optimistically. Meanwhile, the local municipality still uses the nearby space as a landfill, despite the river’s special status, which is supposed to guarantee its protection. “The garbage dump is really a shocking image because it is just an unmanaged dump, there is waste flying all over the place; the wind is carrying the waste and plastic into the river,” Leonard Sonten, a marine biology expert from the German organisation EuroNatur told BIRN. “There are chemicals leaking into the river and animals consuming the waste,” he noted. Sonten calls the continued pollution of a river that has been designated a national park, and the use of the site as a landfill, unacceptable. “They are building the new visitors’ centre right next to the garbage dump, which might be a good thing in the end because it can’t be tolerated any longer – because it’s so visible to visitors to the national park – but I hope they do something sooner about this, because it is unacceptable for a national park,” he added. The Vjosa River runs for about 272 kilometres through Albania and its other 80 kilometres flow through Greece. Albania declared its section a national park in March 2023, after more than 10 years of campaigning by local and environmental activists and scientists. But, two-and-a-half years after this decision, no serious efforts are being made to keep it clean and protect it from industrial and human intervention. Olsi Nika, one of the activists who has advocated for the protection of the Vjosa for years, and who in May won the Goldman prize, a prestigious award in the environmental world, told BIRN that “declaring the Vjosa a national park was not the last chapter of the story. “Two-and-a-half years after the declaration of the Vjosa National Park, it’s being promoted as a very great achievement. But we have identified a series of other problems, such as the extraction of inert materials and water, urban solid waste and plastics,” Nika told BIRN. He added that if the government takes no action to safeguard the Vjosa, the wild river risks becoming a “park only on paper”. “It requires the contribution of everyone to be managed effectively and become a success model of nature conservation,” Nika added. The government’s 2024-2033 plan for management of the Vjosa National Park recognises several threats to the river and its biodiversity from pollution. “The Vjosa River and its tributaries are used for the disposal of some unfiltered waste. Unfiltered wastewater from villages, settlements and individual buildings flows into the river,” it notes. “In addition, several industrial areas along the river discharge their wastewater as well as by-products of the production process into the river (e.g. bitumen production, oil industry),” it adds. The Vjosa River is a vital habitat for over 1,100 species, including 13 globally endangered species. But this summer, it was significantly impacted by oil being spilled into the river, damaging its biodiversity. BIRN witnessed this pollution, with oil being clearly present in the water and the area nearby. In a joint press release in July, the local environmental organisation EcoAlbania and its international partners EuroNatur and Riverwatch raised the alarm that the river was under threat. “The Vjosa River is facing constant pressure from extractive industries, infrastructure expansion and uncontrolled development, putting the ecological integrity of the park and its global value for nature conservation at risk,” the groups wrote in the press release. According to the German organisation EuroNatur and Eco Albania, there are five main threats to the Vjosa’s water and biodiversity: oil extraction, which affects not only the water but the surrounding biodiversity; bitumen extraction and processing, which discharges excavated materials into the river, often containing heavy metals; water abstraction, which includes water diversion for irrigation and urban supply; and industrial use. “For a free-flowing river perspective, water abstraction is the most significant threat, especially to a wild river national park. This is definitely a no-go for a wild river,” Nika said. Other threats include gravel extraction and urban waste, as well as wastewater from both urban and rural areas discharged into the river untreated. When the Vjosa was declared a national park, its three tributaries, the Shushica, Drino and Benca, were included in the protected area. But the Shushica, one of the main tributaries, around 76 kilometres long, currently faces another threat; diversion of water from its source to Himara Municipality, a project of the Austrian company Strabag, which plans to divert this water to coastal resorts. Besjana Guri, who runs the local green organisation Lumi (River), dedicated to rivers, the environment and their integrity, says “taking water from the Shushica spring … not only affects its source but the entire flow of the river. “It is one of the river’s main sources and, considering that the river in summer dried up almost completely in the lower part, imagine what will happen after this [extra] water is taken,” Guri told BIRN. “We will also have a serious drought in the middle section of the river and a decrease in the flow near its source,” she added. She fears that both the Shushica tributary and the whole of the Vjosa could suffer. “The entire integrity of the river will be affected by this project because we are dealing with a reduction in quantity; this will have an impact on the species that live there – if the water is not sufficient, they will not have an environment where they can survive,” she warned.