KĘDZIERZYN-KOŹLE, Poland – It’s a balmy afternoon on a curving stretch of the Oder, Poland’s second-biggest river. Fish, on the hunt, leap briefly out of the water, while kingfishers and herons look on.
These creatures are only the most visible wildlife here. Along the riverbank, more birds can be heard chirping in the trees.
“Life is teeming,” says Agnieszka Konowaluk-Wrotniak, a local activist, as she takes The Parliament on an afternoon tour of the area.
But this idyllic summer scene hides a persistent danger to the Oder’s delicate biodiversity and the livelihoods of those who call the region home. All is not right with the river, some of which acts as a natural border between Poland and Germany. Though it’s one of Poland’s most regulated — the course of the river is more human-made than natural — wildlife preserves like the one that Konowaluk-Wrotniak is showing off still dot its path.
In the 19th century, the Prussians made the Oder an important inland waterway for a newly unified German empire to which this part of Poland belonged. It served the same function when the Nazis took over in the 1930s and then in post-war communist Poland. Since then the Oder has seen a steep decline in commercial importance.
Disaster strikes
Even without much diesel-powered shipping traffic to disturb it, the ecosystem here is under threat. Climate change has steadily driven up temperatures and affected water levels. Those effects dovetail with toxic algae blooms, made worse by heat waves and high salinity.
In summer 2022, one such bloom — a species of algae called Prymnesium parvum — killed off so much water life that it became a diplomatic spat with neighbouring Germany as well as a domestic political crisis that threatened the government of the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS). Some 360 tonnes of fish were killed, according to an EU report of the incident last year.
The toxic bloom was first reported in the Gliwice Canal, which connects southeastern Poland to the Baltic Sea via the Oder. Fishing out dead animals and containing the algae there was part of a frantic effort to protect areas downstream.
“The water in the canal was so salty that metal components of a landing net I worked with to get dead fish out of the water corroded after only a few hours,” Bogdan Wziątek, a biologist who was heavily involved in protecting the river during and since the algae disaster, told The Parliament.
Mining in the region contributes to the Oder’s saline levels. Whether dormant or operational, mines need to pump out water to avoid flooding. That, combined with the risk of another hot and dry summer, has Oder watchers ringing the algae alarm again.
New toxic blooms and more dead fish have been reported in 2024. Hydrological conditions are similar to 2022, according to a report by Poland’s Climate and Environment Ministry in June.
“It’s no mystery that the Oder is a degraded river. We have known about how [salty] its waters are for decades,” Agnieszka Kolada, a hydrobiologist at the Institute of Environmental Protection, a research institute in Warsaw, told The Parliament.
What researchers don’t know for sure, Wziątek said, is the best way forward to reduce pollution from industry and farming or how to carry out forest management in the river’s basin. They are also perplexed by how deadly the 2022 bloom was; algae of this kind are nothing new.
The EU report cited a doubling in salinity levels in less than a week, the precise cause of which investigators could not identify. However, the report also noted 282 places along the Oder where the discharge of industrial and toxic wastewater has taken place without a permit.
Making the Oder great again
Another similarity to 2022, activists say, is the lack of political action despite a change in government. A lot of promises were made during the election campaign last year, Konowaluk-Wrotniak said.
“We had politicians pretty much lining up to talk to us and promising whatever help before the election,” she said. “Now, it’s all gone quiet.”
There have been some improvements, such as river monitoring and faster reaction to potential problems, she added, “but it’s not even close to what should be happening.”
The Polish government — an unwieldy coalition of four parties ranging from conservatives to the left, which kicked out the PiS last year after its eight years in power — appears at odds over the Oder’s future. While the environment ministry wants to see the river restored in the hopes of warding off a repeat of the 2022 disaster, the infrastructure ministry is aiming to bring back the Oder’s historical role as an important transport node.
Though the ministry recently said it would participate in a new legislative proposal to “renaturalise” the Oder, a ministry spokesperson told The Parliament that it hoped that the EU would pay for new river work. The project would allow for a tripling of cargo — to six million tonnes annually — along a longer section, from the Gliwice Canal in the south to Szczecin in the north, near the Baltic Sea.
Scientists like Wziątek think that plan is unrealistic, especially as climate change puts pressure on keeping rivers navigable. Germany’s Rhine river, which is far bigger than the Oder, has suffered repeatedly from low water levels, making passage all but impossible for certain stretches of the year.
”There is not enough water in [the] Oder,” he said. “Changing it would require enormous investments, which would be far more costly than whatever revenues a navigable Oder would turn in,” Wziątek said.
Any plans to re-industrialise the river would have to comply with EU-level environmental regulations. The 2023 report called for a strengthening of them EU-wide, as well as better monitoring of industrial impacts and stronger enforcement at national level.
That applies not just to the Oder but “also in other susceptible European river basin districts,” the report found.
Blame game
“We just don’t know what the government is up to when it comes to preventing a new disaster and what’s going on with all the legislative changes that must happen to stop the discharge of saline water into the Oder,” Anita Kucharska-Dziedzic, an MP for the Left, one of the government coalition parties, told The Parliament.
She criticised the government for falling short of ensuring that Wody Polskie, a state agency responsible for water management, can comprehensively assess pollution levels. As it stands, she said that companies can get permits to discharge wastewater, but there is no effective way to understand the cumulative impact of doing so.
“Fees for discharging saline water and other waste should go through the roof so that it makes more sense for polluting companies to invest in treatment installations,” Kucharska-Dziedzic said.
Government officials blame their predecessors for the problem.
“We are now trying to make mining companies aware that they must now get their act together and stop polluting the river,” Mikołaj Dorożała, the deputy minister for climate and environment, told The Parliament.
Amid environmental protests last year, Poland’s biggest coal mine operator, PGG, denied playing a role in the Oder’s degradation, though acknowledged that pumping mine water into the Gliwice Canal or tributaries feeding the Oder was “not possible to stop,” citing safety requirements.
The ping-pong of blame does not fly with Oder residents, who are growing increasingly impatient with the situation. Michał Zygmunt, a local musician who has become an Oder defender, told The Parliament that he sees a repeat of the 2022 toxic bloom on the horizon.
“Only this time the kill will be less because most fish and clams died in 2022 anyway,” he said.