Today, the Rhine river basin countries adopted the Rhine 2040 programme. The overall aim is to make the Rhine and its tributaries climate resilient and to manage them in a sustainable way. For 70 years now, the successful transboundary cooperation of the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine (ICPR) has shown that more can be achieved in water pollution control by working together.
On Thursday, Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze will meet in Amsterdam with her colleagues from Austria, France, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland plus the Belgian Wallonia region and the European Commission. This year's Conference of Rhine Ministers will focus on evaluating the results of the Rhine 2020 programme for sustainable development of the Rhine, which was initiated in 2001 and influenced the work of the ICPR for many years.
The Rhine countries have managed a leap forward in the fields of water protection and nature conservation. Reconnecting 160 old watercourses of the Rhine and backwaters has created new habitats, in particular areas serving as fish nurseries. The dismantling and removal of 600 obstacles to fish migration now enable salmon and shad to return to their former spawning habitats. The flood risk has been reduced by an impressive 25 percent compared to 1995, mainly due to the construction of flood retention areas.