Europeans move to tame Danube

By Gabriel Partos
BBC Central and South-East Europe analyst

Residents of flood plains need to learn to live with the water

Floods of varying proportions are a regular occurrence on the Danube at this time of the year as the snow melts and the spring rains arrive.

But Europe's second longest river has reached record or near-record levels in a number of countries downstream from Hungary in the past two weeks.

Although floods have always been a natural part of life along the Danube, as with so many other rivers, there is growing awareness that in recent decades human intervention has been increasingly contributing to more frequent - and more serious - flooding.

There have been several reasons for that. One was the replacement of flood plains - that would soak up excess water - with farmland and settlements sheltered behind protective dykes.

Another, the destruction of forests that helped retain ground water near rivers.

Click here for map of affected region

A third reason was the straightening of rivers through canals that accelerated the flow of water, leading in turn to flooding further downstream.

Living together

But what can be done to reduce the threat of flooding?

"We have to increase the water retention ability of the catchment areas," says Hungarian environmental economist, Gabor Ungvari.

We can see a momentum in the shift from just structural measures Igor Liska ICPDR

"That means the reforestation of the high mountains, the re-evaluation of other processes that have also increased the speed of run-offs in the covering areas all over the catchment area, like the canalisation that drives the water quickly away from the place where the rain has fallen."

A few years ago such ideas were confined largely to environmental campaigners. Nowadays they are being gradually adopted by mainstream organisations at both the national and regional levels.

One such institution is the Vienna-based International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, the ICPDR, which brings together 13 countries in the river basin. Its flood protection expert is Igor Liska.

"We can see a momentum in the shift from just structural measures - that means the building of dykes for protection against floods - more towards behaviour that we simply have to live with floods," he says.

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The idea of learning to live with floods can mean several things.

One of these is to provide a more integrated early warning system so that temporary defences can be constructed and people likely to be affected by flooding can be evacuated more effectively in times of danger.

At present, the flood alert system is organised on a national basis - though bilateral agreements provide for a fairly effective way of warning neighbours downstream.

Now a new Danube-wide flood alert system, developed by the European Union's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, is about to be introduced. It will give 10 days' advance warning of expected floods.

"By the end of this year the first 'draft' version of this Danube flood alert system will be being tested," says Mr Liska.

"That will be a pilot scheme. In future it is foreseen that it should cover the whole Danube river basin. By the end of this year the system should cover the upper Danube and part of the middle Danube basin."

'Soft approach'

Installing an integrated, regional flood alert system is one way of coping with floods.

But there is an increasing recognition that successful protection from floods should involve undoing some of the damage done by human intervention.

We have to learn to live together with the river again Gabor Ungvari, Environmental economist

Gabor Ungvari, who has helped work out a project for the river Tisa, one of the major tributaries of the Danube, says we have to "give back territories to the river".

"We have to learn to live together with the river again because during the last decades - even the last two centuries - a lot of villages and infrastructure were built in places where the water circulation of the region cannot tolerate it in the longer term."

Adopting the "softer" approach towards tackling floods will not be easy. Even when it comes to returning arable farm land to meadows, that can be flooded when the need arises, it would mean the payment of compensation to the owners.

In the case of smaller settlements that have been built too close to rivers, resistance to moving away will be motivated not just by economic but also by social considerations.

As for larger cities, the best defence for the time being is to strengthen their flood protection - while ensuring that elsewhere the excess waters unleashed by heavy rainfall or the melting of snow can be soaked up in larger flood plains.

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