Albania runs on the rain that falls on its mountains

How the mountains arrange the country

Albania covers 28,748 square kilometres, extends about 340 kilometres from north to south and only 148 kilometres from east to west, and lies some 80 kilometres across the Adriatic from Italy. About three quarters of that territory is mountain and hill standing more than 200 metres above sea level, and the average altitude of the country is above 700 metres. The remaining quarter is coastal and alluvial lowland along the western edge.

The ranges run the length of the country rather than across it. The Albanian Alps, the southernmost extension of the Dinaric chain, cross roughly 90 kilometres of the north over an area of about 2,000 square kilometres, nowhere wider than 40 kilometres, deeply fragmented and often inaccessible, with elevations approaching 2,700 metres. The Korab Mountains hold the eastern border for some 40 kilometres and about 560 square kilometres, and carry Mount Korab at 2,764 metres, the highest point in the country. In the south-west the Ceraunian Mountains run nearly 100 kilometres beside the Ionian Sea, thousand-metre slopes dropping almost vertically into the water, with Maja e Çikës at 2,045 metres above them and the Llogara Pass at 1,027 metres as the way through.

West of that arc lie the plains. They stretch close to 200 kilometres along the Adriatic and reach about 50 kilometres inland, and the largest of them, the Myzeqe, is an alluvial plain crossed by the Shkumbin, the Seman and the Vjosa.

The borders total about 1,094 kilometres, of which 657 kilometres are land, 316 kilometres shore, 73 kilometres lake and 48 kilometres river, and the coastline itself runs to approximately 476 kilometres. What that shape produces is a drainage pattern with no exceptions in it: rivers rise in the mountainous eastern half, fall fast, and reach the sea in the west after a short distance.

Why nearly all the power comes from rain

Average annual rainfall is 1,485 millimetres. In the mountainous zones the average is about 3,000 millimetres a year and in the western lowlands about 1,000, and Britannica puts the range from more than 2,500 millimetres in the North Albanian Alps to under 760 millimetres along much of the eastern border. The Alps in the far north are among the most humid regions of Europe, receiving at least 3,100 millimetres annually, and four glaciers survive there at around 2,000 metres, an altitude at which glaciers at this latitude are otherwise absent.

The rain arrives on a schedule. 70% of it falls between October and March, with November the heaviest month, and July and August the driest. 86% of river discharge occurs between October and May. Steep ground, a wet winter and a dry summer together give rivers with a high flow rate and a strongly seasonal one.

Nearly 100% of the electricity Albania generates at home comes from hydropower, and only about a third of the assessed hydropower potential is in use. The large cascades sit in the Drin, Mat and Vjosa basins, though the Vjosa mainstem itself carries none. The Drin in the north carries the stations at Fierza, Koman, Skavica and Vau i Dejës, and the Devoll in the south carries Banjë and Moglicë. About 70 small plants exist alongside them, of which 38 were operational at the time of the United Nations environmental performance review.

The consequence is that the grid reads as a rain gauge. Between 2011 and 2015 the country imported between 10 and 40% of its available electricity, the share varying with domestic production, and losses ran to around 35% of the total available.

What the last wild river still does

The Vjosa runs 272 kilometres from its sources in the Pindus mountains at 1,343 metres, east of Ioannina in Greece, where its first 80 kilometres are called the Aoos, and reaches the Adriatic in the south of Albania. Its catchment covers 6,704 square kilometres, of which 4,365 lie on Albanian territory. Along that course it passes through gorges in the upper reaches, braided and anabranching sections in the middle and lower ones, and meanders near the mouth.

The numbers describe a river doing work. Mean annual flow at Poçemi is 141.5 cubic metres a second and the recorded maximum was 3,140 cubic metres a second in 1963. The active channel varies between 400 and 1,000 metres wide. Bed load transport begins at 300 to 350 cubic metres a second, a flow reached on average 29 days a year between 1958 and 1990, and direct measurement puts the total sediment load at the Poçemi section at 5 million tonnes a year, a quantity the researchers describe as a significant contribution to delta development and coastal protection.

The floodplain moves. Between 1968 and 2016 the active channel relocated at 1 to 1.4% of its area per year, which means the whole river and floodplain system is restructured in under a century, and satellite comparison of 2012 against 2016 shows the anabranching system almost entirely changed position in four years. 86% of the corridor is covered by habitats listed in Annex 1 of the European Union Habitats Directive.

Two large dams were planned in the downstream section, at Poçem and Kalivaç. In 2023 the Vjosa was instead designated a wild river national park, the first in Europe, and what the designation holds in place is the sediment budget as much as the scenery.

Where the soil is leaving the country

The 2016 National Action Programme to Combat Desertification puts soil losses to erosion at 20 to 30 tonnes per hectare per year, rising in some areas to 150 tonnes, against an acceptable rate of one tonne. An assessment of potential erosion risk found 24% of land at high risk, 59% at moderate risk and 17% at low risk, with roughly 100,000 hectares of agricultural land in the process of desertification through poor vegetation cover.

The chemistry goes with the soil. About 285,000 hectares, some 42% of agricultural land, have lost organic matter and declined in nutrients, with annual losses of three essential nutrients amounting to 69,609 tonnes, around 40% more than the fertiliser applied.

Forest cover stands at about 29% of the land area, 788,900 hectares in 2020 against 788,800 hectares in 1990, so the national total has held while its condition has not. 11% of the naturally regenerating forest was reported as primary forest, and in 2015 some 97% of the forest area was in public ownership.

Flooding has worsened over recent decades for reasons that are mostly on land rather than in the sky: deforestation, overgrazing and erosion, combined with a lack of maintenance of drainage canals and pumping stations and with reservoir operating regimes. Erosion and hydropower are the same subject read twice. Material stripped off the slopes is the material that fills reservoirs behind dams and that the undammed Vjosa still delivers to the coast.

How the state remade the coastal plain

Between 1945 and 1990 the socialist state rebuilt the lowlands as an engineering project. Roughly 250,000 hectares of swamp were drained, 290,000 hectares were deforested, hillsides were terraced and planted with fruit trees, and subalpine and alpine pastures were broken up for cultivation or improvement. The environmental performance review lists all of it under activities whose effects on ecosystems are still being felt.

The drainage was the regime's showpiece and its public justification was medical. The coastal swamps had been breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes, and their conversion into agricultural and industrial land was cited by Britannica among the achievements of the modernisation programme. The same reclaimed marshland carried the state farms to which political prisoners and their families were exiled for decades, so the country's flattest new ground was also part of its penal geography. Albania: history takes up that period.

What followed reversed the scale rather than the direction. The transition to a market economy in the early 1990s created about 470,000 small family farms averaging around 0.7 hectares, with parcels in hilly and mountainous areas as small as 0.2 hectares, and the fragmentation that produced is itself recorded as a pressure on habitats and species.

The plain remains where the country lives. About one third of the population inhabits the coastal area, and approximately 80% of tourists visiting Albania concentrate there and in Tirana, which puts the population, the farmland and the visitor economy on the strip most exposed to sea-level rise. Albania: travel sets out what that strip is like to visit.

What the lakes and lagoons keep alive

Albania holds more than 250 lakes, predominantly of karstic or glacial origin, and three of them are unusual in Europe. The Lake of Shkodër in the north-west, shared with Montenegro, is the largest lake in Southern Europe. The Lake of Ohrid in the south-east, shared with North Macedonia, has held water for over a million years, and its fauna evolved in isolation. The Large and Small Lakes of Prespa, shared with North Macedonia and Greece, are the highest-lying in the region.

Inland water covers 1,350 square kilometres in total, made up of 325 square kilometres of natural lakes, 130 square kilometres of coastal lagoons and 174 square kilometres of artificial lakes, with 721 kilometres of river. The lagoons are the coastal half of that system. Karavasta, the largest, sits between the mouths of the Shkumbin and the Seman, and Narta, Patoku, Kunë-Vain and Butrint lie along the same shore. Karavasta and Narta are among the most important lagoons in the Mediterranean, and the Dalmatian pelican, the rarest pelican in the world, breeds on them.

The species counts are high for the area. Albania's fourth national report to the Convention on Biological Diversity records 3,228 vascular plant species, of which 27 species and 150 subspecies are endemic to the country, along with 323 bird species, 70 mammals and 64 freshwater fishes, inside 28,748 square kilometres. Brown bear, grey wolf, Balkan lynx, golden jackal, Egyptian vulture and golden eagle are all still present.

There are 799 protected areas covering 5,217 square kilometres, among them fifteen national parks, one of which, at Karaburun-Sazan, is marine.

Why the ground itself keeps moving

On 26 November 2019 a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck with its epicentre about 16 kilometres south-west of Mamurras. It was felt in Tirana and as far away as Taranto and Belgrade, and the worst damage fell on Durrës and Kodër-Thumanë.

The country maps that risk rather than describing it. The Institute of Geosciences at the Polytechnic University of Tirana published probabilistic seismic hazard maps approved in January 2021, reworked from the earlier NATO Western Balkans harmonisation project using the United States Geological Survey modelling package, at two levels: a 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years, a return period of 475 years, and a 10% probability in 10 years, a return period of 95 years.

Those maps are law rather than literature. A Council of Ministers decision of 24 December 2020 ties construction and development permits to a risk certificate, and the institute recommends peak ground acceleration values assessed for every municipality and administrative unit as the design parameter, with elastic response spectra taken from Eurocode 8 and scaled to local hazard and soil conditions. A building permit in Albania therefore carries a number derived from a hazard map.

Earthquakes are one item on a longer list. The same institute assesses mass movements, erosion, sand liquefaction and subsidence, monitoring slope stability with a network of satellite positioning stations and satellite imagery, and it classifies ground into six risk grades from none to very high. The department treats mass movements as one of its main challenges on the grounds that their consequences have been among the most severe recorded in the country, and the mapping they require runs to engineering geology, tectonic and hydrogeological survey and geophysical investigation before a piece of territory can be planned.

What a drier summer would do

The climate scenarios in Albania's national communications point one way. Annual precipitation is projected to fall by 2.6 to 3.4% by 2025 and by 5.3 to 6.9% by 2050, with summer the season that moves furthest, down 8.7 to 11.5% by 2025 and 17.8 to 23.2% by 2050, while annual temperature rises by 0.8 to 1.1 degrees and then 1.7 to 2.3 degrees. The World Bank climate portal records an average temperature of 12.37 degrees and precipitation of 1,294 millimetres over the 1995 to 2014 baseline, with warming since 1970 running at 0.32 degrees a decade.

Total rainfall falls while individual episodes intensify, which is the combination that produces both drought and flood in the same year. The expected consequences named in the environmental performance review are a reduction in long-term average annual and seasonal runoff, an increase in riverine flood risk with the peak moving from spring to winter, and reduced recharge of aquifers, which matters because more than 80% of the potable water supply is abstracted from groundwater.

Every one of those lands on the electricity system. Less runoff means less generation on the Drin and the Devoll, and a shortfall on a grid already importing between a tenth and two fifths of its power in an ordinary year has to be bought abroad. A dry autumn in the Albanian Alps is a fiscal event, and Albania: economy works through what that costs.

The coast takes the rest. Sea-level rise on a shore holding a third of the population and most of the visitor economy brings inundation of wetlands and lowlands, coastal erosion, heavier storm flooding and salt intrusion into estuaries and coastal aquifers, at the same time as the rivers that built and defended that shore deliver less sediment to it.