On May 6th, EcoAlbania together with 28 residents of Brataj village and the Association "Impetus", filed a lawsuit against four hydropower plants planned on the Shushica river to the Administrative Court of Tirana/Albania. The Shushica is one of the most important tributaries of the Vjosa River, which carries high natural and cultural values.

The Shushica - a tributary of the Vjosa in Albania – is once again under attack from hydropower projects. They had already been averted, since the permits for the plants had long expired. However, we now learned that the Albanian National Environmental Agency had already given the green light on November 16, 2021

After a fundraising campaign, solar panels are installed on the rooftops of public buildings and streets of Kutë village on the Vjosa in Albania as an alternative to hydropower plants for the benefit of the local community and environment

At the urging of nature conservation organizations, the Standing Committee of the Bern Convention took another look at various projects in the Balkans at its most recent meeting. These include an airport in the middle of the Narta Lagoon in the Vjosa delta in Albania or a series of hydropower plants along the Neretva in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

For the past eight months, river activists from around the world demanded a Vjosa National Park Now. There have been 23 visual actions across 13 countries in the middle of cities, national parks, in front of national monuments or in special natural places.

After a decade of efforts to protect the Vjosa River in Albania, this petition will gather the voices of all supporters and demand an action that will make a real change: Proclaiming Vjosa as a National Park. Sign the petition and share it with your friends so that we join our efforts to protect what nature took centuries to create.

From May 29 to June 6, a science delegation from Austria, Albania, Italy and Germany collects multidisciplinary data from the two major Vjosa tributaries Shushica and Bënça. This research week is a follow-up of a comparable undertaking at the Vjosa in 2017, which contributed substantially to our success in establishing the ecological value of the Vjosa, fending off the hydropower projects (HPP) and which led to the designation as a protected area.

The election may be over, but the fight for the Vjosa is not. Over the last several months, support for the Vjosa has grown tremendously in Albania, other European countries, and around the world. As a result of campaigning, Edi Rama’s government agreed to a low-level ‘nature park’ protection for the Vjosa in March - which is a good first step.

This baseline survey summarises the value of the Vjosa River system as one of the few remaining reference sites for dynamic floodplains in Europe on the one hand, and reveals the detrimental effects dams could have on the river system on the other. Only one dam will significantly destroy the ecological continuum of a pristine river.

On March 25, the European Parliament adopted the 2021 Albanian Progress Report in which they “urge the [Albanian] government to minimise the impact on biodiversity by stopping hydropower development in protected areas, in particular in areas near the Valbona and Vjosa rivers, and to establish as soon as possible the Vjosa National Park, extending the whole length of the river...”