Celebrating World Rivers Day 2025!
Every year, World Rivers Day reminds us of the importance of rivers for biodiversity, climate resilience, and human well-being. Rivers shape landscapes, sustain ecosystems, and connect communities across the globe. This day is celebrated every year on the fourth Sunday of every September.
European Wilderness Society is making a difference in preserving and promoting wild rive, as a part of European Wilderness Network. Here’s how their work with WILDRivers is helping protect some of Europe’s most pristine riverine landscapes, and why it matters.
What is the European Wilderness Network?
A network dedicated to protecting wild areas across Europe — places where nature is allowed to follow its course, where human intervention is minimal, and natural processes dominate.
We define wilderness and use a Wilderness Quality Standard Audit System to evaluate wilderness areas, helping ensure that the areas are really wild and being preserved in ecological integrity.
The Role of Wild Rivers in the Network
WILDRivers are river corridors (or river segments) embedded within or connected to wilderness-areas. They are especially special because they:
- Flow through undisturbed landscape, often surrounded by primeval forests, floodplain forests, or other intact ecosystems. Thus, habitat complexity is high.
- Retain natural dynamics — meanders, flood pulses, connectivity with tributaries, seasonal variation, intact water regimes.
- Support diverse species, including aquatic life, riparian vegetation, birds, mammals that depend on rivers, for example, otters, certain fish, amphibians, etc.
Examples from the Network include:
- The Velyka Uholka WILDRiver in Ukraine: a typical mountain river with extraordinary scenery, flowing through undisturbed temperate beech forests.
- The Kitka WILDRiver in Finland, within Oulanka Wilderness: known for its spruced flood-lands and riverine habitats.
- The Dyje WILDRiver in the Czech Republic, meanders and alluvial plains around the river are a highlight.
Why Wild Rivers Matter
- They are biodiversity hotspots: wild rivers and their floodplains are home to many species that are declining elsewhere due to habitat loss, pollution, or dams.
- They act as natural corridors linking ecosystems, enabling migration, dispersal, genetic flow.
- They provide ecosystem services: water purification, flood mitigation, sediment transport, maintaining groundwater levels.
- They hold cultural, spiritual, recreational value: rivers shape communities, histories, and offer places for reflection, recreation, and connection with nature.
- In the face of climate change, intact river systems are more resilient.
Threats and What Needs to Be Done
On World Rivers Day, it is important to remember that many rivers are under threat:
- Damming, hydropower projects, water abstraction.
- Pollution: agricultural runoff, industrial waste, untreated sewage.
- Fragmentation: loss of connectivity due to barriers like dams, weirs, roads.
- Climate change impacts: altered flow regimes, droughts, changes in rainfall patterns.
What can be done:
- Support wilderness protections for river corridors
- Ensure river restoration efforts that open up connectivity, restore natural flow regimes.
- Advocate for policies that reduce pollution, protect water quality, respect ecological flow requirements.
- Use science and monitoring, like Wilderness Quality Audits, to track their shape.
Let´s protect and save wild rivers together!
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