How Central Europe’s ’water guardians’ are fighting desertification

Oszkár Nagyapáti climbed to the bottom of a sandy pit on his land on the Great Hungarian Plain and dug into the soil with his hand, looking for a sign of groundwater that in recent years has been in accelerating retreat.

“It’s much worse, and it’s getting worse year after year,” he said as cloudy liquid slowly seeped into the hole. ”Where did so much water go? It’s unbelievable.”

Nagyapáti has watched with distress as the region in southern Hungary, once an important site for agriculture, has become increasingly parched and dry. Where a variety of crops and grasses once filled the fields, today there are wide cracks in the soil and growing sand dunes more reminiscent of the Sahara Desert than Central Europe.

The region, known as the Homokhátság, has been described by some studies as semiarid, a distinction more common in parts of Africa, the American Southwest or Australian Outback, and is characterised by very little rain, dried-out wells and a water table plunging ever deeper underground.

In a 2017 paper in European Countryside, researchers cited “the combined effect of climatic changes, improper land use and inappropriate environmental management” as causes for the Homokhátság’s aridification.

Now a group of farmers and other volunteers, led by Nagyapáti, are trying to save the region and their lands from total desiccation using a resource for which Hungary is famous: thermal water.

Along with the group of volunteer “water guardians,” he began negotiating with authorities and a local thermal spa last year, hoping to redirect the spa’s overflow water, which would usually pour unused into a canal, onto their lands. The thermal water is drawn from very deep underground.

According to the water guardians’ plan, the water, cooled and purified, would be used to flood a 2.5-hectare low-lying field, a way of mimicking the natural cycle of flooding that channelizing the rivers had ended.

“When the flooding is complete and the water recedes, there will be 2.5 hectares of water surface in this area,” Nagyapáti said. “This will be quite a shocking sight in our dry region.”

A 2024 study by Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University showed that unusually dry layers of surface-level air in the region had prevented any arriving storm fronts from producing precipitation. Instead, the fronts would pass through without rain, and result in high winds that dried out the topsoil even further.

The water guardians hoped that by artificially flooding certain areas, they wouldn’t only raise the groundwater level but also create a microclimate through surface evaporation that could increase humidity, reduce temperatures and dust and have a positive impact on nearby vegetation.

Tamás Tóth, a meteorologist in Hungary, said that because of the potential impact such wetlands can have on the surrounding climate, water retention is the “key issue in the coming years and for generations to come”.

Following another hot, dry summer this year, the water guardians blocked a series of sluices along a canal, and the repurposed water from the spa began slowly gathering in the low-lying field. After a couple of months, the field had nearly been filled.