Save Polesia

Polesia, Europe’s Amazon, is under severe threat. A coalition of organizations and government ministries from Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine plan to construct a megalomanic infrastructure project: a 2,000km long navigable connection between the Black Sea and the Baltic. With a length 25 times the Panama Canal, the E40 waterway would be Europe’s longest. It would irrevocably alter some of Europe’s remaining free-flowing rivers, turning them into a commercial route for ships more than 80 meters in length. Pristine rivers would require dredging, damming, straightening, and deepening. All this is proposed to happen within the heart of Polesia, the greatest intact wetland wilderness on the European continent – with disastrous and irreversible impacts for nature and humans alike:

In the current context, with the war in Ukraine, the E40 waterway project is not being taken forward as a single coherent international project. However, the three countries are still committed to their stretches of the waterway and are taking forward individual projects.

We are a partner in the international coalition ‘Save Polesia’, which strives to protect the absolutely breath-taking landscape of Polesia from the construction of the E40 waterway. In order to boost local and regional economies, governments should instead invest in rail infrastructure and make use of the huge potential for nature-based tourism.