It is our mission to restore Europe’s endangered rivers by supporting interventions that lead to the removal of dams and the restoration of river flow and biodiversity.

The creation of the Open Rivers Programme was informed by two years of research and stakeholder engagement which revealed that there are around one million dams fragmenting Europe’s rivers and that there is much potential and need for dam removal. The research concluded that dams are contributing to the significant decline of freshwater biodiversity across Europe and that removing them can quickly restore river flow and biodiversity. It also concluded that there is a genuine lack of understanding of the benefits of dam removal and only a handful of organisations promoting and funding it at the European level.

In recognition of the scale of the problem, a significant funding gap and also the opportunity, Arcadia enabled the creation of the Open Rivers Programme in the spring of 2021. A new entity “Stichting European Open Rivers Programme” was formed in Netherlands on the 25th June 2021 to manage and implement the programme. It will offer grants to remove dams and restore Europe’s endangered rivers.

It is expected that the programme will support around 150 to 200 dam removal projects each year.

European Open Rivers Programme

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