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3.2.4        Inland navigation

Overview

Navigation affects most of the major rivers in Europe due to the presence of inland waterways on the large European rivers and intensive leisure boat activity on the smaller rivers. Furthermore, many canals were developed during early industrialisation and some navigable rivers and canal systems are nowadays used for leisure boats only. In order for natural rivers to be used as modern shipping lanes, numerous changes have been made to rivers and their floodplains. Inland navigation is typically associated with a range of hydromorphological alterations such as channelization, channel deepening, channel maintenance, installation of groynes and flow regulation, which adversely impact water ecosystems (BMU/UBA, 2016; ICPDR, 2007). The alterations are bigger when smaller rivers are made navigable for sizes of ships, which are too large for the natural size of the river. In the second RBMPs, a relatively small number of river and lake water bodies (approximately 700 water bodies spread in 13 WFD countries) were reported as impacted by pressures from inland navigation. However, navigation issues are of high importance in some of the largest river basins in Europe such as the Danube and the Rhine.

Navigation intensity has been increasing in Europe since the 1960s both in terms of the volume of transported goods and average vessel size (Graf et al., 2016). Nowadays, there are more than 37 000 kilometres of European inland waterways spanning 20 Member States and connecting hundreds of cities and industrial sites (DG Mobility and Transport, 2019). The uses on inland waterways include navigation for transporting freight, transporting passengers and leisure. Most of the commercial goods transportation by inland ships in Europe concerns five countries: the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and Romania (EC, 2018). More than two-thirds of all goods of European inland waterways are carried on the river Rhine, which is the backbone of inland navigation in Europe (EPRS, 2014). The total volume of goods transported on European inland waterways is approximately 550 million tonnes. However, this equates only to around 6 % (in 2017) of the total volume of all goods transported in the EU (Eurostat, 2019).

In addition, inland waterways are used for water tourism, sports, fishing and angling, and recreational purposes. The recreational water use of navigable rivers can be of great economic significance in certain regions supporting several thousands of jobs in Europe (PIANC et al., 2004).

The infrastructure network of inland waterways includes the natural navigable rivers, artificial-built canals that link navigable rivers, and inland ports. European inland waterways are part of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) which aims to integrate land, marine, and air transport networks throughout the European Community.

Figure 11           Examples of inland navigation vessels for commercial and recreational purposes

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Source: https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/inland/promotion/naiades2_en; https://www.wikiwand.com/en/River