Germany's Water Management Caught between Flood and Drought
Flood Prevention Responsibility
For at least a decade now, there has been an EU directive obligating member states to manage flood risks. In Germany, that management is principally left up to the individual federal states, or Länder. For example, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which was particularly hard-hit by the flooding, draws up risk assessments and plans and builds protection measures like dikes on large waterways such as the Rhine and Moselle. The German Environment Agency (UBA) recently assessed the measures taken nationwide on the most important German rivers as being effective. And indeed, the water level of the Rhine barely caused any problems during the recent catastrophe.
The rivers whose flooding caused the worst devastation — the Ahr and Kyll in Rhineland-Palatinate and the Erft in North Rhine-Westphalia — are, however, smaller waterways. Here, municipalities are responsible for flood protection measures.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, the state finances up to 90% of the costs for preventive measures against flood and heavy rainfall at a municipal level. According to Malu Dreyer, Rhineland-Palatinate’s premier, €16 million ($18.88 million) has been invested in flood prevention in the Ahr valley. In North Rhine-Westphalia. there is a special fund for such municipal projects, which amounted to €66 million in 2018.
Climate Crisis Prompting Major Changes
Owing to the climate crisis, both of these extreme situations — too much or too little water — will occur more frequently in Germany in the future. To prepare the country for these challenges, Environment Minister Svenja Schulze has laid out a national water strategy. It aims to make lakes and rivers cleaner and healthier, to reform water management and combat water shortages. One of its ideas is to have “smart” water tariffs that make it cheaper to use water during times of low demand. It also proposes setting up hierarchies that will determine who will have priority for using water when a particular region is facing a shortage.
The plan envisages investments to the tune of around €1 billion up to 2030, but still needs to be approved for implementation by the next government. For this reason, the opposition Greens have called the strategy “useless if it is not put into action in the end.”
The word “sponge city” is also used in the plan. In other words, it wants cities in the future to have enough green areas where water can easily seep away and flow into the groundwater. This would mean that water from heavy rainfall would not end up going straight into the sea via the rivers.
In light of the current flood disaster, Germany’s umbrella association for energy and water management, BDEW, also warned that fewer surfaces in city centers should be cemented over and that the remaining drinking-water resources must be protected from contamination. The BDEW’s managing director, Martin Weyand, told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland media group that “we must not recklessly put our drinking-water resources at risk.”
David Ehl is a freelance journalist.This article is published courtesy of Deutsche Welle (DW).
