To Beat the Drought, Europe Needs More Water and Green Space

In 2026, a wave of scorching heat and prolonged drought swept across the Old World, leaving parched fields and shrinking rivers in its wake. It is only a matter of time before national governments begin responding, to a greater or lesser degree, to these unmistakable changes. Yet it is clear that a warming, drying Europe will not be fixed by the measures climate activists favor, such as taxing carbon dioxide emissions or forgoing children.

Ancient Egypt faced a strikingly similar problem, thousands of years ago. "The 4,200 BP climate event was a phase of severe global drought. Its evidence has been attested in many regions of the world and was reported to have played an important role in the collapse of major ancient civilizations", scientist note in a 2022 research paper.

Drawing on archaeological, geoarchaeological and bioarchaeological evidence, the researchers conclude that Egypt's Old Kingdom collapsed in no small part because of the gradual drying up of the land, the falling water level of the life-giving Nile, the resulting poor harvests and the famine that followed.

Egypt, however, was by no means alone in this fate. Severe and sustained drought contributed significantly to the demise of the Minoan civilization on Crete, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia, and numerous other ancient nations and political entities across the region.

Water Rules the Landscape

Jan Pokorny, an associate professor and formerly a longtime researcher at the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, points out that the landscape's pronounced warming, and the drying-out that follows, is linked, among other factors, to water, or, more precisely, to the shortage of water bodies and green spaces across the landscape. When sunlight strikes vegetation fed by water, or water itself, hundreds of watts of solar energy go toward evaporating that water rather than heating the surrounding area.

When sunlight strikes dry surfaces instead, such as parking lots, roads, roofs or solar panels, that same energy heats them to between 50C and 60C. The heated surface warms the air above it, which then rises rapidly and carries moist air away with it. The result is low humidity and high air temperatures. Because water vapor stores no latent heat in this process, morning fog and clouds fail to form, so water never returns to the landscape. The land dries out further still, and the whole cycle intensifies.

"The role of vegetation and water for the functioning of the landscape and life on Earth is irreplaceable. It is indisputable that forests, wetlands or a sufficient amount of water in the landscape, through evaporation, significantly influence the local and regional climate", notes Martin Pivokonsky, associate professor and chairman of the Czech Academy of Sciences' Commission for the Environment and Commission for Sustainability. He adds, however, that while such landscape management can ease the effects of warming at the local and regional level, it cannot halt it on a global scale.

A Blueprint from South Moravia

Pokorny is also involved in international projects, helping with reforestation on the Arabian Peninsula and with water management plans for new ponds in Africa. He often points to the ponds of southern Bohemia as a practical, geographically close example of landscape management done well. This year, a village in South Moravia of just under 200 residents joined southern Bohemia's ranks.

Led by independent Mayor Petr Blahak, the village of Vohancice, in the Brno-venkov District, transformed 33 hectares of South Moravian countryside at a cost of more than 80m Czech korunas ($3.8m). The project delivered a pond and a system of pools, polders, reservoirs, embankments and grassy areas, along with 6,000 newly planted trees and 5,000 shrubs. The payoff has been substantial: a village once under a construction ban because of acute water shortages is now set to add 100 new homes within five years.

The transformation took eight years to complete, with the village covering a quarter of the cost itself. The wells no longer run short, and rainwater now soaks naturally into the ground rather than running straight off down the road, as it did eight years ago, when the village would heat up and stay parched for the rest of the year. According to iMeteo, Vohancice shows that creating water bodies and green spaces, combined with rainwater retention measures, can meaningfully soften the effects of drought and overheating in a community.

Two Birds with One Stone

It is worth noting that in North America, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and other European countries, the Eurasian beaver has, in recent years, helped restore severely damaged water bodies. Like the brown bear, the beaver was once threatened with extinction, and humans have since worked to reintroduce it artificially in many areas from which it had previously vanished. Beavers increase species diversity wherever they settle, and by reshaping the landscape they also save state and local governments money.

Old and new invasive species of animals and plants remain a persistent problem across Europe. Their spread needs to be actively monitored at both the national and international level, and, working with scientists, governments need to find ways to eradicate these species and limit their impact on human health and the economy. Such active intervention is expensive.

The restoration of old water bodies, such as floodplain forests, pools, ponds and wetlands, along with reconnecting the flow of oxbow lakes, has a secondary benefit beyond its primary goal of improving the local climate. It also improves the landscape as a whole: beyond easing temperature and humidity, it captures carbon, helps endangered native water-loving plants spread, provides varied grazing land for livestock and, according to scientists, helps in the fight against invasive plants.

Restoring water bodies therefore also works as a passive measure, ultimately saving the money that would otherwise go toward actively clearing invasive vegetation. Under the pressure of climate change and a steadily rising number of invasive plants, older assumptions about the costs and benefits of intervening in nature are being reconsidered. Where people once drained wetlands to make way for farmland or building plots, many are now restoring them instead.

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