Vjosa Wild River National Park — Free-Flowing River Protection

The Vjosa and its tributaries form one of Europe's last largely free-flowing river systems, historically threatened by a pipeline of 45 planned hydropower plants, including 8 proposed directly on the Vjosa's mainstem.

Protect the free-flowing river system from new hydropower development and end untreated wastewater discharge into the river.

After a decade-long campaign by EcoAlbania, Riverwatch, IUCN and Patagonia's 'Save the Blue Heart of Europe' initiative, Albania designated 12,727 hectares along 270km of river corridor as Vjosa Wild River National Park on 15 March 2023, pairing the designation with an announced roughly EUR75m wastewater programme.

The designation legally shelved the 8 mainstem hydropower dams; courts have since upheld individual cancellations, including the Poçem hydropower plant. Baseline biodiversity surveys record over 1,100 species along the corridor, including 257 bird species, 31 fish species, 70 mammal species and 13 IUCN Red List species. Patagonia has since committed a further $4.6m toward replicating similar river-park designations elsewhere in the Balkans.

As of the 2023-25 reporting period, implementation - ranger staffing, visitor infrastructure and the wastewater programme - remains a work in progress rather than a completed outcome, and measured ecological improvement beyond protecting an already near-pristine river has not yet been independently reported.