The water quality of the Rhine and its tributaries and the environment have improved a lot thanks to good cooperation among all countries. And cooperation will make things better still.
96 per cent of the population is connected to a waste water treatment plant. Many large industrial firms now have their own waste water treatment plant.
The number of species of plants and animals has increased. Migrating fish, especially salmon, sea trout and eel, have been able to get as far as Strasbourg from the North Sea since 2006.
Natural flood plains along the Rhine are being restored.
Protection against high water is also going according to plan, but a lot still remains to be done before we achieve the goals we have set ourselves.
We look far ahead, which is why most of the plans are set up for several years. Rhine 2020 is an example of this. The plan was originally thought up in 2001. How are we going to deal with, for example, high water and the protection of groundwater in the future? It’s all covered. What do we want to achieve, and how? Rhine 2020 led to lots of smaller plans, such as Salmon 2020, which contained a lot of ideas on how to make the Rhine a great place for salmon to live.
The Rhine commission has already achieved a lot through these sorts of plans, but new subjects are coming up all the time on which the countries along the Rhine want to cooperate. For instance, what can you do about micropollution. These are tiny substances that are difficult or impossible to remove in a purification plant. If the level of these substances in Rhine water is too high, they can be harmful.
The levels of harmful substances in fish is another new subject. It will be investigated in all the countries along the Rhine from 2015 onwards.
But pollutants in the water are not the only problem. We also find plastic waste, like plastic bags and bottles, in the Rhine. These can end up in the sea, where the current can carry them to places where they join up to make huge islands of plastic covering kilometres!
Small beads or pieces of plastic are perhaps even more dangerous, because fish and shellfish that eat them can become ill or even die. We still don’t know exactly how much plastic there is in the Rhine or exactly where it comes from. That is why research is being done into this so that we can make plans in future to deal with the problem.
And finally climate change. Research into climate change and action plans to do something about the related dangers will continue to play a major role in the future. Read more about climate change.
