Groundwater: Germany’s reserves are shrinking sharply

Germany’s groundwater levels are rarely as low as they are now. Around 4,400 monitoring stations already showed declining levels at the beginning of August, and the forecast for early September points to an even more serious picture.

The effects of this drought recall the extreme years of 2018 and 2019. More than half of the monitored sites are expected to contain very little water even at the end of October.

Researchers warn that the immediate situation is troubling, but the long-term trend is even more concerning: Germany is losing groundwater. The country has enough water overall, yet the question is increasingly where future supplies will come from and whether existing reserves are being used too wastefully.

For decades, Germany treated excess water as a problem to be removed. People dug drainage ditches through wet landscapes to turn them into farmland, straightened rivers and drained floodplains, and pumped vast quantities of groundwater into marshes and rivers to support coal extraction in open-pit mines and underground workings.

This summer shows how far the country has moved from that earlier concern. The issue is no longer how to get rid of too much water, but how to protect what remains.