Now it’s official: The past winter was “too dry, too warm and with little snow” in Bavaria too. You can read about it in the current low water situation report from the State Office for the Environment from the beginning of March. The Free State is thus heading for another dry year. This is shown by looking at the groundwater levels in Bavaria. At the beginning of March, 61 percent of the measuring points near the surface showed low or very low groundwater levels. In the lower groundwater levels it was even 71 percent. Since then, the situation has improved only marginally. The groundwater reservoirs should actually be well filled at the beginning of spring.
The increasingly frequent dry periods in this country are usually associated with climate change. Because with the general increase in temperature, the usual precipitation is missing more and more often. In Lower Franconia, for example, where much less precipitation has fallen than in Upper Bavaria and the Allgäu for living memory, there are now “areas where it rains just as little as in the mountains of Jordan and Israel”. Environment Minister Thorsten Faithr (FW) repeatedly swears that this is the case. “If we don’t do anything about climate change, our average temperature will rise by up to 4.8 degrees by the end of the century.”
However, global warming and the lack of precipitation are only one reason for the increasing drought in Bavaria. The other is homemade. It is the far-reaching transformation of the former natural landscapes into modern cultural landscapes – through modern agriculture as well as through the construction of more and more settlements, commercial and industrial complexes and traffic routes, but also through the straightening and channeling of most rivers and streams.
Professor Karl Auerswald, who holds the chair for grassland theory at the School of Life Sciences at the Technical University of Munich, and other experts have now made this clear in the hearing “Future of water management in times of global warming” before the environmental committee of the state parliament. The central sentence of Auerswald: “A significant proportion of the drought is regional and local and not due to global CO₂-driven climate change.”
Auerswald named the drainage ditches along the roads in Bavaria as a vivid example. “Taken together, they are six times as long as all the rivers and streams here in Bavaria,” said Auerswald. “They are one reason that the precipitation drains away quickly and does not have time to seep away.” However, this means that they are not used for the formation of new groundwater. Another example is the heavy machinery and tractors that farmers use to farm their fields today. They compact the soil to a great extent. The result: They cannot absorb enough water, store it and release it into the groundwater. The ever larger fields and the cleared corridors ensure that the precipitation, if it does fall, drains away quickly. These effects are no small thing. After all, 46 percent of Bavaria’s area is agricultural land.
New hedges would make sense
Conservationists like the biologist Christine Margraf from Bund Naturschutz (BN) have been fighting against the drainage of the landscape for many years. From their point of view – they agree with experts like Auerswald – it’s not just about the increasing dryness and drought in this country. But also to protect against flooding and local flash floods when it rains really hard. Because the precipitation that accumulates, for example, on meadows, in hollows or along streams and rivers and at least partially seeps into the ground, cannot flood the village or the street next door. “That’s why we now have to take every opportunity to keep water in the landscape,” says Margraf, who also appeared as an expert at the hearing. “Our floors play a central role in this.”
The measures that should be taken are known. The farmers should pay more attention to the fact that their fields can store a lot of water and, for example, refrain from using ever heavier machines. But new hedges, edges and field borders on the fields would also make a lot of sense, because they reduce the rate at which precipitation runs off. In addition, rivers and streams should be given more space by moving dams and dikes back. The renaturation of moors, alluvial landscapes and other wet areas also makes an important contribution to securing groundwater reserves and flood protection. And of course the immense use of land for the construction of new roads, settlements, commercial and industrial complexes, but also traffic routes should be curbed.