the Intersucho portal – a collaboration between CzechGlobe, Brno’s Mendel University and the State Land Office – reported that virtually the entire territory of the Czech Republic was in some kind of drought condition, with almost 35 per cent facing the two worst degrees.
Unhappily, that dire situation is becoming all too frequent, not only in Czechia but to varying degrees across the rest of Central Europe too, as climate change exacerbates existing problems such as poor infrastructure, wrongheaded or absent government policies, and the baleful legacies of Communism.
Take leaky pipes. While not as bad as Europe’s worst offenders Italy, Bulgaria and Romania, the Central European countries of Slovakia, Hungary and Poland all have high levels of non-revenue water as recorded by EurEau, the European federation of national water service associations. Although this measure includes water used for firefighting and street cleaning, experts say it is a good proxy for water wasted through distribution losses.
The average for non-revenue water is 25% by volume in EurEau member countries, though Slovakia and Hungary lie above that mean, while Poland is near the average and Czechia below it. Slovakia and Hungary lose more than three times as much water each year as Czechia does.
Nonetheless, data shows Poland to be one of the countries in Europe with the least water resources per inhabitant, with the situation worse only in Czechia, Cyprus and Malta. While on average there are 4,500 cubic metres (cm) of water available annually for each European, for Poland that number is just 1,600 cm per inhabitant and this can fall to as low as 1,000 cm during summer.
Even in Hungary the water situation is not as healthy as most Hungarians believe. The country has a renewable water reservoir of 11,833 cm per person, one of the highest in Central and Southeast Europe (only Slovenia and Serbia have more in the region). But most of that water – and Hungary’s main rivers – originate from outside the country, meaning the domestic renewable water reservoir amounts to only 768 cm per person, one of the lowest in the region.
“95 per cent of the drinking water in Hungary comes from groundwater, but its levels are falling in most of the country,” Dalma Dedak from WWF Hungary told Klubradio. “The groundwater should be seen as a water bank, where you have to invest, keep up its level, in order to later extract from it.”
Consequences of collectivisation
The Czech Republic might perform well in terms of not wasting water through leaky pipes, but its poor water management is longstanding and deep-rooted.
In general, the state of the Czech environment is regarded as among the worst in the EU, which has left the percentage of its land suffering from drought hitting 98 per cent in mid-July.
“Even though there is no single indicator by which we can measure and compare the drought, we can say that it has persisted since 2015, especially on groundwater in all deep aquifers of the Czech Cretaceous Basin,” explained Jan Danhelka, director of hydrology at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, in the 2023 Prosperity Index report.
Climate change, of course, has had a huge impact that is reflected in the state of the environment in recent years. Yet many of the country’s problems stem from Communism, especially the intensification of agriculture following its collectivisation in the 1950s and 60s.
Intensification factors such as artificial fertiliser and pesticide use, land consolidation, irrigation, and soil drainage helped to increase agricultural production, but also led to unmitigated environmental problems, such as high wind and water erosion, reduced soil fertility, and decreased biodiversity. Pesticides that enter the water from intensively farmed agricultural land remain a significant problem in terms of the quality of surface and groundwater.
Climate change has an especially deleterious effect on the country’s largely coniferous forests, which regulate precipitation, evaporation and flows. “One major direct impact of climate change is the bad health condition of forests, which are vulnerable to climate change manifestations due to long-term economic use inconsistent with natural processes,” a report by the Czech Environment Ministry said.
The hot, dry summers fanned an unprecedented outbreak of bark beetles from 2018 by weakening trees’ natural defences and helping to spawn more of the insects. The scale of the infestation meant large swathes of the forests needed to be cleared, which together with the catastrophic July 2022 wildfire in the Bohemian Switzerland National Park has resulted in the country’s forests now being a source, not absorber of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
“Climate change is deepening the problems that we already had and just ignoring them means climate change will hit harder,” Milan Vitek of Greenpeace CZ, tells BIRN. “If we had changed the structure of the forests – how we keep them, how we harvest them – then it would make them more resilient to drought.”
Although precipitation is predicted to be stable or higher in the future, water will likely continue to disappear from the Czech landscape from rising average temperatures, to the point where, in a few decades, the country could face the problem of being forced to choose between keeping water in the rivers or in the fields, not both, Vitek warns.
Successive governments’ efforts to improve water management have been sorely lacking, say critics. For example, the previous government was headed by populist billionaire Andrej Babis, who derives his wealth from the sprawling agriculture and chemicals conglomerate Agrofert. This company benefits from all aspects of being a large agribusiness, such as better access to subsidies and the consolidation of large fields, neither of which helps the countryside cope with climate change.
“Adaptation is something that we are decades behind when we could’ve been much further ahead,” says Vitek, referring to the current problems with the state of the forests and the huge fields. “If our countryside was much better adapted, we could more easily handle climate change.”
Giga-problems
Hungary’s problems were laid bare by the country’s main electricity producer, the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, having to scale back operations on July 16 after the Danube reached critically high temperatures. Under safety regulations, the temperature of the river cannot exceed 30°Celsius at a distance of 500 metres from “where water from the plant is discharged”. On that day, the temperature reached 29.7°C.
Global warming is taking a visible toll on Hungary’s environment, with heatwaves and flash floods becoming commonplace. The country’s rich agricultural land, with vast areas of maize, corn and sunflower as well as fruit and vegetables, is being threatened by months of expected drought. And last year, cactus and subtropical vegetation appeared on the Hortobagy in eastern Hungary, once home to cattle and an idyllic rural life.
In August 2022, the average temperature was 2°C higher than usual, making it the second hottest month since 1901, with only a third of the usual precipitation. The severe drought led to a 0.6-0.8 per cent fall in the country’s GDP and drove up food prices.
Yet climate change comes not only with heatwaves and drought, but also extreme downpours. This year Hungary has already experienced the first flash floods, with one almost ending tragically after it triggered a huge mudslide that destroyed 21 houses in northern Hungary’s mining area of Recsk.
The main problem, most experts agree, is that Hungary’s land has lost its water retention capacity, so no matter how much rainfall there is, the water does not infiltrate into the soil. Extreme periods of rainfall lead to further land degradation.
The situation requires a complex approach, changing farming techniques, improving soil quality, building reservoirs, and having less river regulation and larger floodplains. But Viktor Orban’s government seems determined to ignore the problem, and critics warn that a policy to attract large investments in battery gigafactories with their huge water demand promises to only aggravate it.
China’s CATL is building what will be Europe’s largest battery factory in Debrecen and there are another 28 factories that either are or will be engaged in battery production or related technologies in Hungary, according to the local media. This, despite strong public protest from locals who fear mounting environmental problems and worsening water shortages.
“If drought hits Debrecen, who will get the scarce water resources? The companies or the people?” Eva Kozma, leader of anti-CATL movement Mothers of Mikepercs, asks rhetorically.
Something fishy
Poland is one of only four EU member states where its annual water resources are below 1,700 cm per inhabitant, the level at which the UN’s World Water Development Report says a country experiences “water stress”. And the problem promises to only get worse.
“About 20-30 years ago, we used to see droughts in Poland every five-six years,” Daniel Kociolek, a representative of Polish Waters, the state company managing water resources in the country, told Newsweek. “Lately, we’ve had droughts every two years, and in the last years it is each summer. The reason? Climate change.”
Like other countries in the region, even when the rains do come after the heatwaves, they are no longer able to compensate for the losses. “It doesn’t rain long enough and not in the right places. The problem is that the dry ground could only be properly irrigated if… it rained continuously for 70 days,” noted Kociolek.
However, climate change is only part of the problem. Polish citizens tend not to be as environmentally conscious as their Western counterparts. Water is still not properly priced as a resource and conservation measures by households (from turning off the tap while brushing teeth to not throwing away food, which is one of the most significant ways consumers waste water) are uncommon.
Yet it would be unfair to put too much blame on the ordinary consumer; according to EU figures, Polish households use significantly less water than their counterparts in many EU countries like Greece, Cyprus and Spain.
Last summer, Poland’s water problems took a very visible and disturbing turn when tonnes of dead fish had to be removed from the Oder river on Poland’s border with Germany. An ecological catastrophe on both sides of the river, the crisis was initially thought to be caused by an illegally dumped toxic substance.
Yet subsequent investigations by authorities, scientists and journalists point to a much more complex cause: with climate change impacting water volumes and its ability to regenerate, the river is no longer able to cope with the industrial waste being dumped into it, particularly by the Polish coal industry.
A year on and environmentalists are warning of a repeat of the catastrophe since the Polish authorities have done little to remedy the problem. In a last-ditch and feeble attempt to do something, Polish Waters in July appealed to coal companies to voluntarily limit the amount of waste they dump into the river, considering the low level of water in the river and its high temperature.
“An appeal for voluntary action does nothing to protect the Oder,” Anna Meres, a representative for Greenpeace Poland, said in a statement. “It’s as if we were asking a child nicely not to eat any more sweets.”
“Polish Waters has the ability to limit the number of permits issued to mines so they stop discharging huge amounts of salted sewage into the Oder. But they don’t do that. Since last year, the institution has done nothing to prevent the Oder from getting over-salted and to help the river system recover,” she said. “The Oder catastrophe continues this year.”
The Polish government is also culpable for failing to invest more in infrastructure to preserve precious water supplies (only Cyprus, Spain, Hungary, Italy and Slovenia have invested less per inhabitant per year over a five-year average in drinking and waste water infrastructure, according to EurEau). At the same time, it is often a vocal opponent of measures to combat climate change, both at the EU level and during global climate negotiations.
Just in the past two weeks Poland has challenged at the Court of Justice of the EU four measures proposed by the European Commission to help fight climate change. The complaints concerned a broad range of topics such as the EU’s GHG targets, land use, ecological transport and the Emissions Trading System.
“Does the EU want to decide in an authoritarian manner what kind of vehicles Poles drive and whether energy prices will rise in Poland?” Polish Minister for Climate and Environment Anna Moskwa commented on social media when announcing the legal challenges.
“The Polish government will not agree to this diktat from Brussels,” said the minister who is reponsible for Poland’s policies on the climate, forestry and water management.
Scorching Slovakia
Amid the scorching summer, several towns in southern Slovakia with no public water distribution system recently had to call in water tanker lorries. A torrential downpour had flooded local wells and polluted the drinking water.
“Wells are still contaminated and we cannot use them,” Radnovce mayor Aladar Bari told the media in late June.
These lorries were also on duty this time last year – and in more towns – as local people were left without drinking water due to one of the hottest summers ever recorded by the country’s meteorologists.
“In this part of the town [with no public waterworks], all the water in the wells has dried up and the stream that flows here is also dry,” Banska Stiavnica mayor Nadezda Babiakova told the media last summer.
About 450 towns in Slovakia do not have any public water distribution system.
In 2022, drought hit more than half of Slovak territory and lasted more than 200 days in some areas, according to the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute. The country saw wells and several rivers dry up, a major drinks maker reduced the use of water to the minimum, electricity production from water was down by 12 per cent, several towns introduced hosepipe bans, and the forests and farmers had a particularly hard time of it.
Though drought is not the big topic it was last year, about two-thirds of Slovakia continues to be affected by drought of varying intensity today.
“The average temperature here [in Central Europe] has increased by about 2.5°Celsius compared to the period from 1851 to 1900,” said climatologist Milan Lapin. “This is roughly twice the increase in global temperature.”
In spite of this, a report by the Supreme Audit Office published at the end of 2021 found that Slovakia is not sufficiently prepared to deal with drought in order to eliminate threats to the environment and society as a whole. “It is necessary to change the approach from crisis management of the consequences of drought to active management of the causes of the drought,” said the Office’s head, Lubomir Andrassy.
Despite several strategies on how to adapt to climate change, Slovakia does not have a drought management strategy. Moreover, the Office concluded that drought management is not coordinated by a body with a strong mandate from the government, which should be the Environment Ministry. The report also found that the Environment Ministry has not looked into all the data on drought such as its historical occurrence and areas with a potential threat of drought, nor has it established a system of drought indicators.
Slovakia’s biggest drinking water reservoir and Europe’s biggest river island, Zitny Ostrov in southwestern Slovakia, belongs to the regions that are most threatened by drought in Slovakia, the Environmental Policy Institute said in this year’s report. Deforestation and agriculture are to blame.
To fight climate change, Slovakia has invested a lot of money on flood-prevention measures to date. For years, most of this money has come from the EU. Still reliant on funds from Brussels, Slovakia is now trying to focus more on water-retaining measures, reforms of national parks and landscape planning, and an effort to modernise its irrigation infrastructure in agriculture.
“We are literally committing a sin when we discharge increasingly scarce rainwater into the sewers,” Slovak MEP Martin Hojsik has repeatedly said in recent years. “We simply have to take action against the drought.”
In spite of the record-breaking past summer, drought has not become a priority issue for politicians ahead of the September general election, nor for the interim technocratic government.
And water supply companies do not seem to be all that bothered by drought and wasting drinking water, either. “Trnava Water Supply Company offers pool owners the delivery of drinking water for filling pools with a water tanker lorry,” reads the firm’s offer on its website.
Source : Balkaninsight