Posted on February 5, 2025
Although there are EU directives that call for the protection of rivers, to date, Romania has not fully put an end to sand and gravel extraction from riverbeds. It is suspected that political backing and the cooperation of authorities have made it possible to dredge deeper and deeper into riverbeds under the guise of flood protection works. As a result, groundwater levels are falling along with river levels. This not only poses a huge threat to river wildlife, but, combined with the effects of recent droughts, it also represents a serious danger to agricultural production and the freshwater resources.
According to the current legislation, the extraction of sand and gravel in Romania can only take place on former floodplains, i.e. outside the riverbeds. Rivers have been changing their courses over the past millennia, which means that layers of deposited sand and gravel can be found in the soil along their banks. It is possible to extract these subsoil deposits by removing the topsoil and excavating the gravel layer beneath. The water used for washing the extracted material would have to be stored in reservoirs or in depressions created during excavation until it settles and clears up, after which it could be released back into the rivers or even reused. At the same time, following the example of Western European countries, the fine sand obtained from the sedimentation process could even be sold.
Dredging in riverbeds is harmful because the excavation deepens the rivers, causing the soil in the drainage basin to become drier and drier, thus exacerbating the already problematic effects of severe droughts.
Rivers no longer supply water to the surrounding areas, including agricultural parcels, but act as drainage channels: the lower riverbeds become permeated by groundwater from the surrounding area and then discharge it – which, combined with the increasingly frequent droughts, has devastating effects. This makes the deepening of rivers not only a conservation issue, but also an economic one, as it poses serious problems for agricultural production.
When the used water is discharged back into rivers in an untreated, turbid state, however, it clouds the rivers, which significantly compromises the ecological status of aquatic habitats. “Turbidity can have a variety of negative effects on fish, but also on algae and many other organisms that play an important role in the food chain of rivers. For example, it hinders the ability of fish to see, but a more significant problem is that fine sediment settles on fish eggs, thereby killing them. At the same time, newly hatched fish offspring are extremely sensitive to water turbidity, and in the few weeks after hatching, a significant proportion of the larvae and juveniles die,” explained fish biologist András Attila Nagy. He explained that prolonged turbidity can alter the aquatic ecosystem, promoting the spread of species that are more resilient to turbid environments (usually invasive, introduced species), while more sensitive, native species may decline or disappear altogether. Overall, water turbidity leads to a reduction in the number of species and impoverishment of the ecosystem. More sensitive species disappear, leaving only those with greater resilience to survive. Although the turbid water will eventually clear up and the sediment will settle a few kilometers away from the source of pollution, the effects of the sedimentation will be compounded in areas where gravel pits are numerous and dense. In other words, by the time the water has cleared, it is likely to have been stirred up again by the turbid water of another inflow.
As gravel- and sand extraction, as well as illegal mining are becoming more and more of an environmental burden, lawmakers are preparing to ease the requirements for gravel extraction. For one thing, the construction industry needs more and more raw materials, and Romania is preparing for huge road building projects. The government is planning to build hundreds of kilometers of highways and expressways, mostly with EU funding. According to Romanian Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu, some 2,500 kilometres of highways and expressways are scheduled to be built by 2030 at a total cost of €40 billion. According to the minister, this will require 5 million tons of ballast, i.e. aggregate (a mixture of gravel and sand) and 120 million cubic meters of fill material. Meanwhile, extractive companies are complaining that they are unable to deliver the raw material – gravel and sand – at a sufficient pace because, they claim, it is taking too long to obtain permits for new extraction sites.
“There is so much money in sand and gravel extraction, and the companies are generating so much revenue that they can pay off anybody. Even the authorities are in on it. Since they can’t grant permits for extraction in the riverbed, they issue permits for riverbed regulation works. But if a company gets a permit to remove, say, 100 cubic meters of gravel, it can extract thousands of cubic meters using the permit as a pretext. And it’s difficult to verify,”
explained Endre Sárkány-Kiss, a biologist and retired professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Under his direction in the 1990s, conservation specialists carried out fundamental ecological research on Transylvania’s major rivers, including the Someș. According to Endre Sárkány-Kiss, large-scale extraction disguised as riverbed management was a problem 30 years ago as well, but “it was not being practiced as aggressively” then as it is now. More and more companies are extracting in the riverbed in more and more places, because the construction industry has a growing need for raw materials. “There is a processing site on the Mureș River, near Gornești, which was already in operation when I was a child, in the 1950s. Since then, they have been going 50-60 kilometers up and down the river, constantly dredging it in the name of riverbed regulation. As a result, the level of the Mureș has dropped by about one and a half meters along this stretch, and you can clearly notice that groundwater is flowing out from under the fields into the riverbed,” said Endre Sárkány-Kiss. He added that it is difficult to challenge this practice after the water authority claims that this is necessary flood protection work.
In order to get an idea of the conditions on the Romanian stretch of the Someș River we paddled the middle-lower section of the river from Dej to the Romanian-Hungarian border, a distance of about 230 km. We primarily paid attention to where excavation was taking place in the riverbed and where gravel processing stations were discharging untreated, turbid water into the river. We saw several large extraction sites, and although it was clear that they were causing serious damage to the environment and were in no way compliant with the Water Framework Directive, it turned out that most of them were operating legally.
We asked the regional water authority, the Someș-Tisa Water Basin Administration (ABA Someș-Tisa) and the county’s environmental agencies for the permits issued for extraction units and washing stations, to compare with what we saw in the field. The authorities, however, did not send us intelligible maps, but instead scanned the official written reply in pdf format, which included a table of coordinates in a special projection use for official purposes called Stereo 70, plus the x- and y-axes were reversed in some places. In other words, a layperson would not have been able to pick out anything from the data set in the reply. It took the work of a separate cartographer for us to obtain maps that could be used in the field and which in fact correctly marked the authorized areas. This does not reflect the spirit of the Aarhus Convention, which guarantees broad public access to information on environmental decisions.
The course of the Someș river from Dej, Romania, to Vásárosnamény, Hungary – Map
“Since the data was sent in a poorly scanned pdf format, it was impossible to copy it. This meant that I had to type each coordinate separately into a map-making program, where I converted it from the projection system they used to another. Then I connected the resulting points in a third mapping program, which is how I finally managed to visualize the authorized areas on a map,” said Tihamér Fülöp, a mammal researcher and one of our colleagues for this project. “I spent almost an entire day preparing the first of these maps from the official data, even though I’ve done a lot of mapping in the past and am fairly adept at it. The others went more quickly, especially after I found a decent text recognition program online, but I find it outrageous that in the 21st century a government agency provides data in this manner.”
As we canoed down the river we also used drones to take aerial photos of the areas we considered suspicious, which we then compared with maps produced from the data we received from the authorities — of course, only to the best of our ability, as not all county and regional authorities provided us with usable data sets. The various county authorities responded very differently to our data requests: while the Satu Mare County Environmental Protection Agency (APM) promptly provided the data sets, there were counties that only responded after repeated follow-up requests, and others, such as the APM in Cluj County, which refused to provide data and referred us to another authority for assistance. On the basis of our field observations and map comparisons, we returned several times to locations we considered problematic and monitored what was happening.
For the identified turbid water discharges, we sent notifications along with photos to the regional water authority, the county environmental protection services, as well as to the county agencies that oversee protected areas. According to the response of the Department of Water Resources, they audited the companies and found our reports to be substantiated. They instructed the companies at fault to clean out their sedimentation basins and treat the water from the gravel wash before discharging it into the river. In its response, the authority also promised that it would continue to monitor this problem in the future. We too continued to monitor, and we found that there was one company that did not heed the water authority’s orders and went on releasing untreated water into the Someș. And there was also one which, despite having cleaned out its sedimentation basin, was pumping the dirty water through a pipe from above onto the river bank, thereby steadily washing the sludge deposited on the river bank into the water. In other words, it was essentially rendering the water of the Someș as turbid as before.
The water authority’s injunction has had no effect: gravel washers continue to release turbid water back into the river – Photo
The overall impression we got was that the extractive companies weren’t the slightest bit concerned about the state of the river’s wildlife. For example, they dump their waste – the residual material after sorting and washing operations – into the water, including the layers of soil that are removed during extraction in the floodplain. As a result, the river banks around the extraction sites often resemble a garbage dump. We were particularly appalled by one such waste deposit in Satu Mare County, which prompted us to lodge a complaint. Tens of meters of the riverbank were covered with soil displaced from the excavation site, burying bankside vegetation and destroying habitats, such as a stretch of high banks where European bee-eaters and sand martins nested. All of this took place in a nature reserve, since the lower part of the Someș is an EU protected Natura 2000 site. Nevertheless, the regional water authority and the Satu Mare County Environmental Protection Services both claimed that we were mistaken – that what we had seen at the site was merely natural soil erosion, and that there was no evidence that the company working there had been dumping its waste into the riverbed.
While authorities claim, that the process of natural erosion was the cause, we believe that the extractive company working near the bank pushed its waste into the riverbed of a nature reserve
European bee-eaters and sand martins nest in holes dug into the high banks, adjacent to the bank covered with extractive waste. It is possible that such a habitat was destroyed by the company extracting near the river
One place where we discovered rather blatant destruction of nature was at the entrance to the Țicău Ravine, one of the most beautiful stretches of the Someș River, where it runs through the mountains at Benesat. Seeing signs of extraction, some fishermen began to complain that what had been a large island rich in wildlife at the entrance to the ravine a year earlier was now all but cleared away. This, along with the dredging of the riverbed, has reduced the variety of species at their favorite fishing spot, as the once variable, faster-flowing stretch with gravel shoals has been replaced by a deep crater that looks more like a ditch than a river.
Illegal extraction at the Țicău Ravine – an island once existed in the section behind the dredging machine
Google Earth shows that there indeed used to be an island here, and not a small one at that: 360 meters long, 53 meters wide, almost 15,000 square meters, with tall trees. However, according to the data received from the authorities, it turns out that the company has a dredging licence for this stretch of water. However, during our subsequent inspection, we found that the excavation company did not content itself with the extent of its permit, but continued to excavate the riverbed much further down. We managed to confirm with drone footage that the excavators were digging 265 meters below the authorized area, and we filed a complaint with the Sălaj County Police Department and the water and environmental authorities. The regional water authority replied that they had not caught anyone in the act firsthand, nor had they found any traces of illegal excavation. They added that they would only be able to take action against the reported offence if they could identify the perpetrator, which they said was no longer possible.
The island in the ravine as seen on Google Earth in 2020, and its half-excavated state in September 2023
We also discovered illegal extraction downstream in Satu Mare County. For example, according to the information we received from the local authorities, one company had a permit to dredge a 370-metre stretch of the river near Băbășești, yet signs of dredging were apparent for kilometers above and below that section. In fact, drone footage even revealed excavators and trucks. We reported the illegal extraction to the authorities along with footage of the traces of earlier illegal extraction, requesting them to take action against the violators. However, the response we received from the county environmental protection service and the regional water authority was that they had not seen any companies engaged in illegal extraction during their patrols, nor had they found any traces of past extraction. Yet you don’t even have to go out to the riverbank to convince yourself that this stretch of the Someș is subject to massive illegal extraction: on Google Earth, you can hardly find an aerial photo without an excavator dredging in a prohibited area.
Subsequently, we witnessed illegal activity on this stretch of water several times during our inspections, so – following the advice of our lawyer Andreea Szabó – we got the police involved. When we managed to catch the excavation company in the act again, we called the emergency number 112 to report it. We were connected to the Satu Mare County Police Department, who sent out a patrol. When they arrived, the excavator and trucks were still working at the site, so the officer had the opportunity to talk to the workers, who identified the company they were working for. The officer then called the owner of the company and said we could go, and that we’d get a phone call with an update on the situation. Later we received the call and learned that the owner of the company admitted that they were indeed working at a place where they didn’t have a permit. The officer explained that the owner then promised that they would stop working in prohibited areas. My impression was that the officer was insinuating that maybe I could drop the charges. I requested the officer to report back in writing on the measures taken, which they promised to do in three days. However, they did not call at the agreed time, nor did they reply in writing or even answer the phone. After more than a month, I submitted a petition to the Satu Mare County Police Department requesting information on their actions in this matter. Even after thirty days, which is the legal deadline for a response, I still had not received any information.
Extraction of the riverbed near Babașești
And the company in question persisted, continuing its illegal extraction from the riverbed. Upon our next visit, we again found their equipment outside the authorized section of the river, so we again reported the incident via 112 as well as to technical authorities. Once we arrived on the riverbank, the trucks had stopped coming back, and the excavator operator had quickly disappeared. The police said that as they could not find any of the workers at the site, there was nothing they could do, and after a phone call to their superiors, they promised that officers from the economic crime unit would be out the next morning to investigate the incident.
As the relevant authorities failed to take action against the illegal extractors based on our reports, we turned to the police
After about a week, the Satu Mare County Police Department responded by post, saying that they had investigated the case, but found no evidence of any activity that would necessitate the involvement of the judicial authorities. Incidentally, it was not clear from the police’s letter which of our petitions was actually the one they were responding to: the first one from the end of September or the one from the beginning of December. Their letter contained neither a case number nor a reference to the date of the submission. Why they had done so was only made clear to us later, after we had received a joint reply from the county environmental protection services and ANANP (The National Agency for Protected Natural Areas), stating that the company did in fact have a permit for the section in question. It turned out that, just four days before our second report, the authorities had issued a dredging permit for this stretch of the Someș, which had already been aggressively excavated for years.
It’s more profitable to extract in prohibited areas
You might be wondering, why do companies with a dredging permit also (or, mainly) excavate in places where they are not authorized to do so? According to János Márk-Nagy, who used to work in nature conservation management at a reserve in Satu Mare County, it is likely because it makes more sense financially. The companies’ contracts specify the quantities that they can extract, for which they subsequently have to pay taxes and various fees to the state as well as leasing fees to the water authority. On the other hand, revenue from the sale of illegally extracted quantities is theirs alone.
We did some rough calculations to get an idea of what sort of figures we’re talking about. We contacted several extraction companies, and most of them quoted a price of around 50 leu per ton of gravel. However, there was one company who had a site close to the contentious locations that offered sand and gravel at a much lower price than market: 30 leu per ton. We timed an excavator loading a 20-ton truck from the river, which was about 3 minutes, so we estimated that with maneuvering it was about 5 minutes per load. Given 8 hours of work, this comes out to around 57,600 leu (4.8 million forints, 11.5 thousand euros) worth of gravel extracted per day.
To the left is the Someș river in a turbid state, in early summer. But it’s still clear that the sludge from the sedimentation basin on the right is being poured into the river without treatment
We also found out that the stretches of the Someș where it is possible to legally dredge are not limited to the ones found in the regional water authority’s information notice. We sent a data request to the authorities, which revealed that the water authority had authorized dredging and riverbed reshaping activities at 13 sites along the 230 km stretch of the Someș below Dej. However, during one of the field visits, we noticed that work was being carried out in the riverbed above Chizeni, a village in Sălaj County, in a section that was not included among those authorised for dredging. We reported this as well and received the reply that the company was working with the approval of the regional water authority. A municipality in Bistrița-Năsăud County (!) was extracting gravel for the municipality of Spermezeu, situated 55 km away by road, under the heading of emergency intervention. According to the law, this type of work can occur in the event of a sudden emergency situation where the accumulation of sediment threatens human life or critical infrastructure. No permit is required, and contractors do not have to go through the necessary steps to perform the dredging work, such as commissioning geological studies or obtaining a permit from the National Agency for Mineral Resources (ANRM). All that is needed is a simple approval (“aviz”) from the regional water authority.
And the occasional lie, adds Silviu Chiriac, an adviser to the Vrancea County Environmental Agency, who says the vast majority of work being done in riverbeds is fraudulent. The excavation of a riverbed for flood prevention purposes often begins when an extractive company notifies the water authority that it would like to excavate, and then the authority locates and designates the site for the excavation. “And that’s where the lie comes in. The water authority’s employees fabricate various hazards caused by allegedly excessive accumulation of sediment or a collapsing bank, and on the basis of these, they lease sections of the river for dredging. The water department staff explicitly encourage companies to lease river sections, probably for a little something in return,” Silviu Chiriac explained. He added that he was convinced that the vast majority of so-called emergency interventions were not justified, and that most of them were in fact just a front for extraction activities. Incidentally, we did not come across any features that appeared to be at risk of flooding in the area of Someș near Chizeni, which was the site we had reported. In its reply, the water authority assured us that it would keep an eye on the company’s extraction activities to ensure that they did not exceed the permitted 2,000 cubic metres. The place where the company had started work was also at the tip of an island, which is why we suspected that yet another island was in danger of disappearing. We checked this spot on two more occasions, but saw no signs of further work, so for the first time during our project we speculated that we might have succeeded in preventing an extraction that would have led to serious environmental damage.
The island on the Someș at Chizeni that we may have had a hand in saving
To see the number of locations where it is possible to engage in the dredging of the Someș River between Dej and the Hungarian border, we sent out yet another data request to the regional water authority to find out how many emergency intervention permits were issued for 2023 and 2024. The Somes-Tisa River Basin Management Authority informed us that in the last two years approvals were given for a total of ten sites. Adding it with the number of authorized dredging works, we get 23, which equates to about one site every 10 kilometers (of course, only assuming that they are evenly distributed, which is not the case).
According to the water department, the municipalities themselves are the beneficiaries of the emergency interventions, i.e. they own the extracted gravel and sand. According to Silviu Chiriac, the political parties are also trying to win the support of mayors by allowing them to extract 5,000 cubic meters of gravel from riverbeds tax-free every year. He pointed out, however, that the benefit only applied to taxes and fees, meaning that the municipalities would still have to obtain a permit for the work. That is unless they are dredging for the public good – for example, to remove allegedly hazardous accumulated sediment from the Someș riverbed, as the regional water authority claims.
Former minister: There’s an organized crime network in gravel extraction
Barna Tánczos, the RMDSZ (Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania) politician who served as Minister of Environment, Water and Forests from December 2020 to June 2023 (and is currently Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister), announced two years ago that there would be a crackdown on illegal riverbed extraction operations. According to the politician, the legislation is sound, but it is just the application that is problematic: the relevant authorities ought to take their duties seriously and carry out more thorough checks. Tánczos thinks that dredging riverbeds should only be allowed in special cases, for example when there is too much sediment and there is a real risk of flooding. In his experience, the competent authorities that should be monitoring the excavators often turn a blind eye to illegal extraction.
“There was a case where we ordered a major inspection, but the illicit extraction operators were aware of the operation before we got to the site. Somehow the information had been leaked. I don’t know exactly where they got it because we had a large inspection team that included representatives of the water resources authority, the environmental protection service and the economic crime unit. I think that we should replace the management of these authorities, especially the county and regional water resources managers. It may be the case that Bucharest is not sufficiently strict in demanding compliance with the law, but the regional managers simply do not want to carry out inspection tasks,” said the former minister, outlining the problem. According to him, the heads of the authorities are appointed on political grounds and therefore do not focus on their professional duties.
“Every new administration that comes to power replaces the heads of the authorities all the way down to the county level, such as the water authority and the environmental protection services, appointing their own people in the process. This is what the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party did recently. It is an organized crime network, involving not only the dredgers but also the transporters. The truckers recognize the cars of the inspectors and notify one another. If they deem it necessary, they all collude at the local level to carry out the illegal activity without interference,” claimed Barna Tánczos. When asked if he had reported the violations which he had become aware of, he said that he had “verbally informed law enforcement” but as to whether there were any developments, he didn’t know because he was no longer the environment minister.
As for the criticism that water department personnel generally ignore environmental concerns, he observed that indeed many water employees still carry the mentality of the communist system. “They prefer the water to flow in a controlled manner: they think in terms of protection barriers, embankments, dams, etc. This is what they learned at university and it is difficult to change their mentality. And it’s a mammoth institution with thousands of employees”. As to why the water department primarily treats dredging as a source of revenue, the ex-minister said the department also needs money, otherwise it would have to be financed by the state. “There would have to be political will to solve these problems. We’ll see whether the new government has that political will,” he said.
Barna Tánczos did not consider the provision allowing municipalities to dredge 5,000 cubic meters of gravel per year to be problematic. He pointed out that he had not seen any abuse in this area. Of course, there have been odd situations, he explained, where ten to twenty applications had been submitted for relatively short stretches of river. He thinks that there are some regions where they are not even aware of this opportunity. (Otherwise, if we were to assume that all of Romania’s municipalities make use of this possibility, it would mean that more than 16 million tons of sediment are dredged from rivers every year.) According to Tánczos, the legislators intended this measure to help municipalities that had problems with, for example, paving their streets. He said that at most 10% of the municipalities are making use of this opportunity, and he does not suspect any abuse, as municipalities are not allowed to engage in trade with the gravel thus extracted.
The worst findings since the cyanide spill in 2000
In order to get an idea of the ecological status of the lower Someș in Hungary – about 50 kilometers in length – we had a thorough fish population assessment carried out. According to the head of the research team, Zoltán Sallai, the river’s biodiversity is in bad shape, despite the fact that aggregate and gravel extraction from the riverbed is effectively banned in Hungary and that dredging is only allowed in justified cases. He explained that the previous work of fish biologist László Antal made it possible for him to compare the results of the current research with the results of studies carried out between 1994 and 2009, which showed that the biodiversity of the river section studied by both of them has decreased. This means that there are now fewer fish species in the Someș than before and that the ecological status of the river has deteriorated significantly. Over the past 25 years of research, a total of 56 fish species have been recorded from the Hungarian section of the Someș, while only 23 species were detected during the recent assessment.
The fish survey getting underway on the Hungarian section of the Someș
“In the recent, 2024 study, the Hungarian section of the Someș River achieved a ‘poor’ ecological rating under the Water Framework Directive’s classification scheme. The only year with a worse rating was 2000, when there was cyanide pollution. On the basis of a single survey, we cannot say that the ecological state of the Someș and its fish fauna have deteriorated because of dredging in Romania. Most importantly, we do not know to what extent the river in Romania is polluted. We also do not know exactly to what extent gravel extraction in the riverbed has increased. What we can say is that the increased dredging in the upper stretches, as reported in the press, may have caused such negative changes in the Someș’s biodiversity,” concluded Zoltán Sallai.
The researcher also mentioned an interesting finding: during the study, two specimens of the highly protected species of the Danubian gudgeon (Romanogobio uranoscopus) were caught, which is new to the Hungarian section of the Someș. He added, however, that the apparently positive change could be due to the species’s preference for strong currents and gravel bottoms, and the fact that its habitat has been destroyed by dredging in the upper Someș, it has been displaced from there. Thus it moved downstream to the lower stretches of the river.
“It’s mind-boggling that in the 21st century, when we have relatively accurate weather forecasts, we manage flood and inland water control by diverting floodwaters from dam-confined rivers as quickly as possible. There has been a critical shortage of rainfall across Central Europe for years, yet water authorities – and this applies to both the Romanian and the Hungarian side – are wasting on a massive scale,” said fish expert Zoltán Sallai. He said that rivers and streams are essentially seen as drainage channels, ignoring the fact that they are vitally important habitats.
A large haul with a fishing net, including the vimba bream, the common nase, the common chub, and Kessler’s gudgeon; a species new to the Hungarian stretch of the lower Someș the Danubian gudgeon
“Weather forecasters can predict exactly where and how much rainfall is expected two to three days in advance. It would be enough to concentrate on releasing excess water to accommodate the surge, rather than keeping the canals dry for most of the year, which would be completely overgrown by the time the water arrived. Floodplain wetlands, backwaters, reservoirs, ponds should not be kept dry, but should be allowed to retain water and only be discharged when flood waters arrive, and then refilled again after the surge. Retention of water would not only help to raise groundwater levels, thus mitigating the effects of drought, but would also change the local microclimate, with increased evaporation potentially resulting in localized rainfall,” he explained.
He added that in the past, people were capable of coexisting with floods and inland waters – just think of traditional floodplain management techniques. It is only recently that there has been a widespread desire to get rid of the water we consider unnecessary as soon as possible. Of course, another factor contributing to the risk of flooding is the clearing of hills and mountainsides in the upper parts of river basins and deforestation, because this leads to a rapid run-off and rapid rise in water levels when winter precipitation is not retained. But dredging rivers is not the right solution. “Higher education institutions and universities where water resource engineers are trained would also need to teach ecology, so that ecological and nature conservation aspects can be taken into account when planning works,” said Zoltán Sallai.
Romania is currently in the process of restructuring its administrative bodies and amending its laws to make it easier for companies to obtain permits for mineral extraction. This is why the experts involved in our project – Attila András Nagy, fish biologist, László Péter Pap, ornithologist and Tihamér Fülöp, mammalogist – have drafted some proposals for legislative changes to reduce the ecological footprint of the imminent large-scale construction projects, especially highway construction.
- Clean up corruption at the public authority level, replace corrupt leadership.
- Do not allow dredging companies to sell the sand and gravel they extract, so that they have no interest in extracting more than their contracts allow. Given that the projects concern flood protection measures, which are in the public interest, the government should bear the cost of the work. The sale of the mineral resources extracted should be carried out by an operator independent of the extractive companies.
- Remove the provision allowing municipalities to extract 5,000 cubic meters of gravel per year from riverbeds.
- Establish an ecological perspective within the water resources department, not only focusing on flood protection, but also on water retention and habitat conservation.
- Only carry out dredging / floodplain management activities where there is a genuine need, preferably using the water authority’s own machinery.
- If inspectors from the authorities discover criminal activity, seize the excavators and trucks, as in the case of wood theft.
- Implement the Extraction Radar application, which was promised ten years ago, modelled on the Sumal monitoring system used in forestry.
- Make official permits accessible to all citizens, accompanied by online maps that can be used by the general public.
Our experts have also made suggestions for improving the ecological status of the Someș. They explained that the physical characteristics of a river in its natural environment include meanders, floodplains of tens or hundreds of meters or more in width, and numerous islands, which in the initial stages of their formation take the form of gravel- and sand banks. Meanders are important in reducing water velocity and retaining water and, together with islands, they provide a diverse and heterogeneous aquatic habitat for wildlife.
Extraction of sand from the riverbed at Babașești
If we just consider a fish’s point of view, the water in a meandering, island-strewn river can be shallow or deep, slow or rapid, have a gravel or sandy bottom, be interspersed with aquatic plants, shaded by floodplain trees or exposed to the sun. This heterogeneous biosphere can be the habitat of many different species of fish, forming a diverse, varied and rich fish population. In contrast, only a few so-called generalist fish species, which are able to adapt well to changing conditions, can survive in a river that has been straightened out by river regulation projects, where the vegetation along the banks has been cleared and gravel extraction has resulted in the creation of a homogeneous drainage channel free of obstructions and islands that break up the water flow. These species are most often non-native, invasive fish species, which further reduce the chances of survival of native, often rare and protected fish species that have adapted to specific habitats. This is precisely what our study on the Someș has revealed: native fish species with more specialised needs have disappeared or become very rare (e.g. sterlets or striped ruffes), and have been replaced by generalist and non-native, invasive fish species.
Although the water quality of the Someș River improved significantly after the fall of communism, mainly due to the bankruptcy of the factories in Cluj-Napoca and Dej, the ecological status of the river has been declining again in the last few years. In the last 15-20 years, the river has again become increasingly polluted, mainly due to municipal wastewater, agricultural pesticides, fertilizers and gravel processing sites. Over the past seven years, a total of 25 fish species have been identified during scientific studies carried out in the Romanian section of the Someș (between Dej and the Romanian-Hungarian border). The most endangered category includes fish from the former floodplain of the river (the Crucian carp, the tench, the sunbleak, and the weatherfish), a significant proportion of which have not been recorded in the Romanian floodplain for the last 50 years.
The adverse effects of chemicals used in the agricultural sector are further supported by the fact that we found several steep banks in the lower Someș that would be ideal for sand martins, and there wasn’t a single sand martin nest to be found. It is likely that the use of chemicals in agriculture has reduced the mosquito and insect population along the river to such an extent that, despite providing ideal nesting sites, these banks do not host any due to a lack of an adequate food source. This food supply has also been significantly reduced by the drying up of what was once the Someș floodplain.
The cornfield extends all the way to the bank of the river, despite the pressing need for floodplain forests
Based on our recent study, we can say that the river is in the eleventh hour in terms of its natural state and ecological condition. Much of the Someș was fortunately saved from the major river management works of the 20th century, but its floodplains have largely been eliminated, the floodplain forests along the river’s banks have been converted into agricultural land, and recently, as a result of gravel extraction, the river has been transformed into a uniform, rapidly draining, poorly diversified body of water. And this is without mentioning some of the other factors that threaten the river, such as pollutants from agricultural land and residential areas. Although we only managed to find traces of the once healthy natural conditions in the middle and lower reaches of the Someș, it is evident that the river could still be saved with effective intervention by public institutions. There is still the prospect of restoring destroyed habitats, and most of the species that have survived in isolated natural patches of the river could re-establish themselves in areas they used to live in.
But if we fail to take drastic action to stop this devastation over the next few years, it could become irreversible. There are already species of fish (the Danube sturgeon and the European eel) that were once present in the Someș but now cannot re-establish themselves – even if we succeed in restoring the river to its original state – because they have been completely wiped out from it. The first, and perhaps most urgent step would be to completely stop the extraction from the riverbed and restore part of the former floodplain. Restoring the floodplains would not only benefit wildlife – as these floodplains have the capacity to store huge amounts of water and would therefore also provide flood protection – but would also help to replenish groundwater and thus reduce the negative impact of the ever more frequent droughts.
This does not mean cutting off infrastructure investment, but rather extracting the raw materials needed for these investments in such a way as to minimize the negative impact of such activities. An example of such a protective measure could be to extract gravel and sand from the former floodplain, rather than from the riverbed, and to do so only where it is permitted and at a level that does not yet cause lasting damage to the environment. At the same time, it would be necessary to treat and recycle the water used in the gravel processing, thus avoiding the problems caused by turbid water discharged into the river (killing fish, their eggs and offspring), and the fine-grained sand resulting from the treatment could be used as a valuable raw material.
In order to alleviate the pollution of the river, it would be necessary to create a few tens or even a hundred meters of woodland in the floodplain (which would require planting native tree species), which would filter the water run-off from agricultural land that is laden with organic matter, insecticides and pesticides. If in addition to all this, the wastewater treatment plants were modernized, perhaps in a few decades we could get back to where we were in 1887, when Herman Ottó wrote in The Book of Hungarian Fishing that “a proper fisherman drinks the water he fishes in”. In fact, thanks to Herman Ottó, we know that fishermen were able to identify the river they were paddling on by the taste of the water. This was useful when boating in large flooded areas, such as the lower part of the Criș River Basin, where the waters would swell like the sea during the spring floods.
What happens when this leads to disputes between Romania and Hungary?
It doesn’t take much foresight to see that water disputes between countries will escalate in the not too distant future. In an increasingly warm and unpredictable climate, the way countries share the water resources of their common rivers will become a strategic and national security issue. Border rivers may present less glaring problems. For a downstream country, problems can arise if not enough sediment flows down the river, but also if an activity in the upstream country alters the biological communities. The extraction of sand and gravel in the Romanian stretch of the Someș, which is often illegal, is likely to have an impact in Hungary.
Even if the mines on the river are causing ecological damage, it is hard to imagine that they will get the public’s attention. For that to happen, it would take powerful images like the ones we saw in the case of the cyanide pollution in the Tisza River. So, seeking legal redress may not be realistic either.
“To simplify international law, water is considered good if it is low in chemical pollutants. The scale and dynamics of the wildlife it sustains are not typically dealt with. These rules were crystallised in the first half of the 1990s, when cross-border river pollution became the biggest problem,” said Gábor Baranyai, adjunct professor at the Department of Water and Environmental Policy at the National University of Public Service in Budapest. He believes that international law could also devote more attention to the issues of water quantity, sediment, riverbed alteration and even water temperature.
International public law generally upholds only a few principles, one of which is the prohibition of material injury and the other the obligation of fair and reasonable use. Legal experts also argue that these principles are vague and that it is difficult to trace specific normative provisions back to them. Baranyai believes that they can only be applied to prevent extreme situations, citing the 1992 diversion of the Danube by Slovakia as an example, which the international court ruled was incompatible with reasonable use.
Under international conventions, upstream countries have a duty to coordinate if their activities have a significant cross-border impact. “Mining, for example, is a typical scenario, we can raise our voices and say that we were not consulted, but it is up to us to prove that there was an impact that led to irreversible changes,” said Gábor Baranyai.
If there has been damage, or a conflict has arisen between two member states, then recourse can be made to the European Commission, but the lawyer says that there are no really good dispute resolution mechanisms or strict procedures yet. What is positive about EU law, however, is that proceedings can be brought even for the smallest individual infringements; although it is true that the European Commission is rather more and more concerned with systemic problems. According to Baranyai, smaller cases have a chance when they manage to attract a lot of media attention and more NGOs get behind them.
