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.

“One of the most striking signs of this change, for example, is that the amount of biomass produced is decreasing, forests are changing, fodder is dwindling. In addition, some plant and animal species are disappearing and being replaced by a variety of drought-tolerant species. Desertification has begun, the Mediterranean climate is displacing much of the fauna and flora, and if we continue like this, the process will intensify,” the ecologist concludes.

Water conservation is a must

The key to the solution lies in water conservation, another long-standing scientific priority, and the European Union has also set up concrete action plans. The EU Water Framework Directive, adopted in 2000, sets a clear, practical target for restoring water (and thus, inevitably, its environment) to as natural a state as possible through various technical interventions, including the purchase and flooding of certain areas by the state.

Obviously, the water-covered part of the land will be taken out of agricultural production in a given year, but in return, the crops in the surrounding area will have access to water and can produce better crops, thus reducing the extent of the drought.

A good example of optimal water distribution is the Ős-Dráva Program, which was launched in 2018 along the River Drava in the Hungarian-Slovenian-Croatian border area. The main objective of the project was to improve the water management potential of the once water-rich and still naturally beautiful region, to help retain water from the area and to provide recharge from the Drava to compensate for the increasingly frequent periods of drought.

Copy editor: István Vass