2021-03-04

Rivers´regulation in Poland: open letter to the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

Moratorium on rivers’ development is required in the implementation of any project financed by public money.

The reason for calling for a radical intervention by the Polish Prime Minister concerns the ill-adapted water management. The current state of the water management and the challenges of the national wealth: the natural river network in Poland, is a serious problem. Supporting the need to renegotiate the Water Act, quick and radical measures are necessary to prevent further devastation of rivers.

Therefore, we call for:

• Water management in Poland should be performed by an institution responsible for the protection of the environment, natural resources, climate and forestry to implement modern descriptions of natural rivers (by care and shaping in the corridor of the development of natural channels). It is important to equip this institution with appropriate funds for the protection and maintenance of rivers, but also with the possibility of constituting an opinion on the methods of interference by all stakeholders in the water resources of river valleys.


• Introduce a general moratorium on the development, deepening and damming rivers in Poland. Ban use of obsolete catalogues and guidelines drawn up before 1980, until the introduction of a regulation to define modern rules for river shaping with understanding the river morphology of channels and its environmental requirements.


• Arranged a variable river basin management in Poland to restore the natural ecosystem services. Use natural retention potential to counteract the effects of climate change (in the context of drought and floods, while recovering the near-natural self-purification of basin systems to reduce the adverse effects of emissions from basin areas).