In Brittany, volunteers are catching and relocating trout and young salmon to oxygenated waters downstream to save them from drying rivers caused by intense heatwaves.
This effort highlights the severe drought affecting French rivers, with many streams drying up and water levels reaching historic lows amid ongoing climate challenges.
Along the Odet River in Brittany, fisher Mathieu Le Bouter and a dozen volunteers are catching hundreds of trout and young salmon – not for sport but to save them.
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They are only a few miles from the source of the river, which springs from the Black Mountains in Finistère and runs for about 40 miles (65km) into the Atlantic Ocean, but the water is barely up to their knees.
“The situation is catastrophic, far worse than we thought,” said Le Bouter, of the Finistère fishing federation. Once they catch the fish, he and his team transfer them to tanks of oxygenated water then release them 10 or 12 miles downstream where the rivers are joined by tributaries, raising the water level.
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“The fish are under a great deal of stress. When you combine very high temperatures with low levels of dissolved oxygen, problems arise,” Le Bouter said.
“What’s really scaring us is that the 10-day forecast suggests there won’t be any rain, and temperatures will generally be high. The fish, particularly trout and young salmon, need water with a current and oxygen, so these conditions become lethal for them.”
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While the fires raging across forests in France are a dramatic reminder of three successive heatwaves in as many months, the state of the country’s rivers provides another, no less worrying insight into the impact of extreme heat supercharged by the climate crisis.
The Loire, France’s longest river, is at a historical low, with the flow of some branches, including through the city of Orléans, reduced to a trickle between sandbanks. Two weeks ago, 16% of French rivers were reported to have dried up. A quarter of small streams were stagnant or had disappeared altogether, according to the national low water observatory. There has been little rain since.
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The Dive River, at Rom in the western Deux-Sèvres department, is dry, and all that is left of the Mignon further north is a dusty bed. Normally at this time of year, water levels would be between 40cm and 70cm.
The Seine, which divides Paris and supplies drinking water to the city, is now “on life support”, declared Le Monde, with half of the river’s flow being drawn from reservoir lakes upstream and its tributaries in Champagne and Burgundy, a measure that would not normally be needed for another month. In Vernon, Normandy, the flow of the Seine has dropped from an average of 200 cubic metres per second in July last year to 110.
Despite a rainy winter that caused flooding, the sweltering heat this summer and low rainfall since April has created an extreme drought, sucking rivers across Europe dry.
In France, 99 out of the country’s 101 departments are under water restrictions, and a state of emergency has been declared in 58 of them. In a statement, the ministry for ecological transition said almost a third of river monitoring stations had recorded the lowest levels in 20 years and a quarter of smaller waterways had dried up. It noted a rise “in the death of fish linked to the rise in water temperature”.
“The situation is very worrying,” it added.
An emergency agriculture bill passed by the French parliament on Tuesday, which facilitates the construction of water storage tanks for crop irrigation and livestock farms, has raised concerns over the equitable sharing of water resources and fears that farmers are being prioritised.
Claude Roustan, the president of the national fishing federation, said rivers were suffering not just from the drought and climate change but “excessive extraction” of water to irrigate scorched crops.
“We are the first line of observation of the state of the waters across France; we act as first responders and what we are seeing is that some areas are in great difficulty,” he said. The agriculture bill, he added, ran counter to conservation efforts.
Le Bouter said water levels in the Odet and nearby Isole River, where Atlantic salmon spawn and the young fish develop before migrating to the ocean, always drop in summer, but never this early. He described the current situation as “a vicious circle”.
The drop in river levels causes a rise in water temperature, which kills the aquatic vegetation. Other plants grow back, particularly filamentous algae, further reducing oxygen levels for the fish.
“As the days go by, the environment becomes increasingly suffocating for them. Without doing what we are doing, those that remain are doomed,” Le Bouter said. “We’re in a crisis situation.”
Le Bouter says he and his volunteers will keep wading through the Odet and Isole for as long as necessary.
“We seem to be the only ones who are concerned about the fish. Unlike birds, deer and foxes, which are more visible, they tend to get forgotten.”
He added: “It’s the holidays, and we’d rather be doing something else, but at the moment we’re the only ones out there carrying out these rescues and systematically raising the alarm.”
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