Poland's Persistent Drought: Experts Warn of Insufficient Local Action

Professor Iwona Wagner, speaking to Rzeczpospolita, highlights a critical and ongoing issue facing Poland: a persistent drought that has been a reality since 2013. She emphasizes that while the problem is finally being discussed, scientists have been sounding the alarm for years about climate change and its inevitable consequences for water scarcity in Poland.

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We have a drought in Poland. The question is: again, or still? Professor Iwona Wagner: We have had a permanent drought since 2013, since then we have been in a water deficit, which is constantly deepening.

Wagner points to Poland's specific hydrogeological conditions, which make a large part of the country highly susceptible to drying out. She attributes the current crisis to a consistent drift towards climate warming and landscape degradation, making the drought an obvious outcome of past actions and inactions. While global climate policy is largely beyond Poland's influence, Wagner stresses that local processes are heavily dependent on the awareness of decision-makers, the public, and political choices, areas where she finds Polish efforts to be inadequate.

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I am glad that it is being talked about, but I would like to emphasize that scientists have been talking about this problem for over a dozen years, and for several decades they have been repeating that the climate is changing and such a situation will occur.

The professor elaborates on how Poland loses water by dismantling its "blue-green infrastructure." She explains that vegetation plays a vital role in improving soil's water absorption, replenishing groundwater, and facilitating the water cycle through evaporation and rainfall. Therefore, proper management and protection of existing vegetation are paramount. She notes that while theories and strategic documents advocating for landscape protection and ecological processes exist, including those from global bodies like the IPCC and EU biodiversity strategies, they translate poorly into tangible actions within Poland.

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Poland has such hydrogeological conditions that a large part of the country is simply drying out very intensively and is very susceptible to it.

Wagner criticizes the prevailing governmental visions, which she believes still prioritize urban development plans. When water retention is discussed, it often focuses on large reservoirs, which she dismisses as the wrong approach. Instead, she advocates for strengthening landscape protection, preserving its functions, restoring watercourses, their connectivity with valleys, and wetlands. This perspective, rooted in ecological science, contrasts sharply with what she perceives as a continued focus on development over environmental preservation in Polish policy-making.

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We are losing water by getting rid of blue-green infrastructure, because it is vegetation that allows the soil structure to change to be more absorbent, causes infiltration, replenishes groundwater, causes evaporation, and then a large part of the evaporated water returns to us in the form of rain.