By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Mar 21 2007 (IPS)

Austrian composer Johann Strauss wrote the Blue Danube waltz in 1867, but 140 years later the waters of the river are not quite blue, and no one is sure they will be again.

The second longest European river after the Volga in Russia, this 2,888 km river, now a waterway, has paid the price for industrialisation, modern development and accompanying pollution over years.

Environment ministers from 16 countries sharing the Danube River basin have now adopted a new declaration to improve cooperation to protect the river.

The declaration “recognises the important values of the Danube/Black Sea region, the historical damage that it has undergone, and recent signs of environmental recovery as a result of cooperative actions.” But it says “more cooperation and efforts are required by all 16 countries and the European Union (EU) to improve the environment.”

The Danube rises in the Black Forest of Germany and flows down to the Black Sea. Its 4,500 sq. km delta is a rare and rich wildlife reserve.

The 16 countries in the Basin along the way are Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and Ukraine. They have between them a population of 148 million.

Half of them are EU members (Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), while five – Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Slovenia and Turkey are not on the Danube banks. But their economies are linked to the river due to its transport potential, or they are around the Black Sea.

The countries are all parties to at least one of the protection conventions, the Danube River Protection Convention and the Black Sea Protection Convention, but additional efforts are needed in order to achieve improved environment in and around the Danube.

One of the major issues now is the nutrient pollution that starts up the river, and then gets released into the Black Sea. Nutrient pollution is the contamination of water by too many nutrients, which often come from fertiliser use or waste runoff.

This causes overproduction of organisms which use oxygen in the water and suffocate fish and other water life. Much of the banks of the Danube are in flatlands with high agriculture production.

The effort to treat and reduce nutrient pollution is one of the primary tasks of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)/Global Environmental Facility (GEF) efforts in the region.

Several projects to promote safe farming have been launched in countries such as Croatia and Serbia. But the problem continues.

“The nutrient pollution problem is far from over,” Ivan Zavadsky, UNDP regional programme director told reporters in Bucharest in Romania where the environment ministers met. “We have been working for over 15 years to better understand the problem and come up with solutions. Now is the time for concerted action for basin-wide measures such as municipal wastewater treatment upgrades and introducing phosphate-free laundry detergents.”

Serbian experts say some major obstacles have been removed in recent years. The Danube flows through Serbia for some 600 km.

“A lot has been done, particularly when problems in Serbia were concerned,” environmental activist and former environment minister Andjelka Mihajlov told IPS. “For a while, it had seemed that the issues in this country could be the stumbling block for many years.”

Serbia had to clean up the Danube near the town of Novi Sad, some 60 km north of Belgrade, where three giant bridges were destroyed in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombing in 1999.

The destruction of the bridges blocked traffic along the river; the riverbed was covered with 7,000 tonnes of debris. It was cleared only by 2003, at a cost of more than 30 million dollars donated by the international community.

NATO aircraft also destroyed 18 reservoirs at the Novi Sad refinery and five in Pancevo. This town is also situated on the Danube, only 10 km from Belgrade.

The reservoirs were full of crude, and thousands of tonnes simply went into the river and soil. More than 16 million dollars donated by international organisations had been spent by the end of 2006 to treat the toxic waste in the river.

“It was an ecological disaster,” Prof. Dusan Reljin from Novi Sad told IPS. “Such pollutions know no boundaries, and a lot of efforts have been made to deal with the situation.”

The Danube faces chronic difficulties as well. One of the clogs along the river is the giant system of Djerdap I and Djerdap II hydropower plants, built in the early 1970s some 250 km east of Belgrade, and shared with neighbouring Romania.

They are considered “environmental black spots”, due to the accumulated toxic sediments in the artificial lakes, created after the plants were built.

“The environmental effects were not mentioned 30 or more years ago when the dams were built,” a now retired participant in that project told IPS. “A study into these was top secret, buried deep in the drawers of one of our party bosses.” Both Serbia and Romania were under communist regimes at the time.

“Unlike then, environment is something we all care about now,” he said.

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