Open Access

Non-technical summary: There has been a long history of conflicts, studies, and debate over how to both protect rivers and develop them sustainably. With a pause in new developments caused by the global pandemic, anticipated further implementation of the Paris Agreement and high-level global climate and biodiversity meetings in 2021, now is an opportune moment to consider the current trajectory of development and policy options for reconciling dams with freshwater system health. Technical summary: We calculate potential loss of free-flowing rivers (FFRs) if proposed hydropower projects are built globally. Over 260,000 km of rivers, including Amazon, Congo, Irrawaddy, and Salween mainstem rivers, would lose free-flowing status if all dams were built. We propose a set of tested and proven solutions to navigate trade-offs associated with river conservation and dam development. These solution pathways are framed within the mitigation hierarchy and include (1) avoidance through either formal river protection or through exploration of alternative development options; (2) minimization of impacts through strategic or system-scale planning or re-regulation of downstream flows; (3) restoration of rivers through dam removal; and (4) mitigation of dam impacts through biodiversity offsets that include restoration and protection of FFRs. A series of examples illustrate how avoiding or reducing impacts on rivers is possible – particularly when implemented at a system scale – and can be achieved while maintaining or expanding benefits for climate resilience, water, food, and energy security. Social media summary: Policy solutions and development pathways exist to navigate trade-offs to meet climate resilience, water, food, and energy security goals while safeguarding FFRs.

The article deals with place names/toponyms in Slovene and German, two languages that were in contact since the 8th century. Local names of geographical features are endonyms and differ from the foreign names (exonyms) for the same feature. Since both languages existed at the same territory because of the political reasons, the Slovene ethnic territory was under a strong influence of German language. Because of that German has a lot of german exonyms for Slovene geographical features and the Slovene language has a lot exonyms for geographical features on german territory. For the bilingual region of Austria where a small Slovene minority lives the bilingual endonyms are typical. The pairs of German and Slovene bilingual toponyms were generated also for international regions. The author discusses the types of bilingual geographical names. The knowledge of such bilingual place names is relevant for many issues such as translation and intercultural linguistics.