Germany's dry rivers spark battle over engineering vs. restoration
As a heat wave dries Germany's rivers, government ministers are at odds over what to do about it—re-engineer the waterways or restore them to their natural state.
The debate has flared as rapidly falling water levels have revealed vast sandbanks on the Rhine, Danube, Elbe and other rivers, severely disrupting cargo shipping crucial for many industries.
With climate change driving record temperatures and longer dry spells in Europe and beyond, scientists warn that the problem will intensify in coming years.
Germany's new transport minister, Steffen Bilger, convened a recent crisis summit with shipping, port and logistics operators to discuss the problem affecting the European Union's biggest economy.
The key short-term countermeasure he announced was to temporarily lift a ban on truck transportation on Sundays and public holidays to help ease cargo bottlenecks.
In the longer term, Germany needs to dredge deeper navigation channels and develop a new class of low-draft ships, argued Bilger, a member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative CDU/CSU bloc.
"We must make our waterways more efficient while simultaneously making ships suitable for times of low water," Bilger said Wednesday after talks with state transport ministers.
"That is why we are pushing ahead with important expansion projects," he added, vowing that environmental protection would be "kept firmly in mind."
Speaking in Berlin the same day, Environment Minister Carsten Schneider of junior coalition partner, the center-left SPD, offered a radically different vision centered on restoring rivers.
After a campaign over hundreds of years saw rivers tamed for commercial use, he urged a shift back "toward natural rivers featuring meandering branches and floodplains that retain water across the landscape."
Shift in thinking
"In past centuries, Germany was a land rich in water," he said. "Great effort went into straightening rivers to harness them for our use, but also into enabling agriculture by draining the wetlands."
Now, however, climate change has turned water into a scarce resource, requiring a shift in thinking, Schneider argued.
His views echoed those of environmental groups that oppose deepening shipping channels.
"They do more harm than good," said Beatrice Claus of the WWF.
"Expansion and straightening cause water to drain away into the North Sea and Baltic Sea even faster, rather than being retained in the surrounding area."
Dredging is not a permanent solution, critics argue, because rivers constantly fill the channels with new sediment.
Environmentalists also say riverbank fortifications destroy shallow-water zones where aquatic life and insects breed—and the adjoining natural floodplains that act like sponges during times of excess water.
"Dredging rivers creates the illusion of taking action," said Olaf Bandt, head of environmental group BUND.
For now, most German states have lifted the Sunday trucking ban—banking on a mode of transportation with a far heavier carbon footprint than riverboats.
Thomas Puls of the German Economic Institute said he did not expect the move to make much difference, telling newsweekly Der Spiegel that it takes at least 150 trucks to replace a single inland waterway vessel.
The partially dried-up river bed of the Rhine in Duesseldorf, western Germany, on July 28. 
With climate change driving new heat records and longer dry spells in Europe and beyond, scientists warn that the problem of dry rivers is only set to intensify. 
Environmentalists urge the protection of shallow-water zones where aquatic life and insects breed, and of natural floodplains that act like sponges at times of excess water.
The head of the opposition Greens, Felix Banaszak, meanwhile, accused the Merz government of doing too little about the root cause of the problem, the climate crisis.
"The rivers are drying up. Ships cannot operate. Yet the new transport minister comes up with nothing more than deeper shipping channels and different types of vessels," Banaszak told the Rheinische Post daily.
"It is characteristic of this government that everything is being discussed except climate protection ... Instead of addressing the root causes, the government applies Band-Aids to ever-widening wounds."
© 2026 AFP
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Reporting from Phys.org contributed to this story.
