THE DAM BUSTERS

“In the Netherlands, salmon was once seen as food for the poor,” says Herman Wanningen, founder of the World Fish Migration Foundation and the Dam Removal Europe movement. “There was a lot of salmon in the 1600s and 1700s, and people didn’t want to eat it every day. Millions of the fish travelled in from the sea and up rivers through the delta on their way to Germany and the Swiss Alps.”

Then came a dramatic change to the rich riverscape with the Delta Works in the mid-1900s; a series of construction projects in the south-west Netherlands to protect the area of delta surrounding the rivers Rhine, Schelde and Maas. “The Dutch say ‘we’re proud of how we managed the delta. We built dams, sluices, dykes, locks and levees, to make it safe for humans and reduce the risk of flooding’, but the result was that it was not a good place for fish,” explains Wanningen. “That, in turn, had an impact on birds and fish-eating