“They want to help us save this remarkable river,” says Ulrich Eichelmann, CEO of Riverwatch and coordinator of the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign to protect Balkan rivers. It’s here, just upstream of the construction site, that more than 60 scientists from 17 countries converged in June for “Neretva Science Week.” Most had traveled there as self-funded volunteers, united in a common purpose: to save the Neretva. A 35 megawatt hydropower plant with a 53-meter high dam is in the advanced stages of construction: felled trees line the river bank, making way for what will become a reservoir, and access roads for logging trucks and construction vehicles cut like scars through the forested landscape. These dams could harm not only the river and its inhabitants but the wider environment that depends on this unique waterway.Īt Ulog, a village on the Neretva, you can see the potential destruction firsthand. According to the Center for Environment, a Bosnian conservation organization, more than 50 hydropower projects are proposed along its length and its tributaries, with almost half of these planned for the upper reaches, which have so far remained wild and unobstructed. The river, like many worldwide, is threatened by dams. One of the coldest rivers in the world, it is home to unique ecosystems and myriad rare species, from marble trout and yellow-bellied toads to the elusive olm – blind salamanders that live in the river’s network of caves.īut this could change. A mesmerizing blue-green, it runs 140 miles (225 kilometers) from deep within the Dinaric Alps to the Adriatic Sea – at some points disappearing into subterranean channels before re-emerging in bubbling springs. The Neretva River carves its way through Bosnia and Herzegovina’s impenetrable forest.
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