Climate change: Deserts and cacti will conquer Hungary?

Desertification has been called “the greatest environmental challenge of our time” and climate change is making it worse – wrote The Guardian more than a decade ago. Could climate change turn Hungary into a desert?

Although the term brings to mind the windswept sand dunes of the Sahara or the vast salt pans of the Kalahari, it is a problem that threatens the food security and livelihoods of billions of people. What is more, the so-called desertification is a real threat not only in Africa, but also in Hungary.

Fortunately, this summer has been less droughty than last year, when, for example, the eastern part of our country did not receive significant rainfall for half a year, while the Lake Velence was threatened by drought. All this was compounded by water restrictions, drinking water shortages and weeks of heatwaves of over 40 degrees Celsius. Is last year’s extreme weather anomaly just an unprecedented period of extreme weather, or is it a preview of things to come? The leading Hungarian news portal 24.hu asked Dr András Balázs Lukács, senior research fellow at the Ecological Research Centre (Ökológiai Kutatóközpont), about the phenomenon.

According to the researcher, if we do nothing, our Great Plain will be facing desertification in the long term. “This is no longer the future, the visible signs of the transformation are the loss of grassland cover, the drying out of closed forest communities and the spread of cacti, the emergence of species native to the Mediterranean and the increasing number of watercourses classified as intermittent. ”

Read also:

• Researchers: the Hungarian Great Plain may completely dry out – Read more HERE
• New tick species carrying potentially fatal disease found in Hungary

Will future Szeged look like this?

Frequent and prolonged droughts in Hungary

Lukács notes that precipitation is clearly decreasing in Hungary and that frequent and prolonged droughts are predicted in the near future. Nevertheless, it is not last year’s extreme drought that is the most worrying, but the slow desiccation, which is only noticeable in its progression.

Desertification. What does this mean in practise? Imagine a ‘sponge’ that expands to the first impermeable layer, several metres below us, with large cracks and depressions on its surface. As long as this sponge is the soil, and if it is saturated with water after a rain, the plants are safe, they can get the water they need without rain for a while. If the water is artificially drained and a drought of several years sets in, the soil moisture disappears with the surface water for years and decades.