Drought in the south-west. Will drinking water become scarce in the country?
The German state of Baden-Württemberg is currently analysing all 1100 municipalities to see if their water supplies will still function in 25 years’ time if droughts become more frequent. One worrying finding is that only a quarter of towns and cities seem to be on the safe side.
In times of climate change, we have learnt that droughts and water shortages occur in summer – but now this: At Lake Constance, the Constance/Rhine water level is reporting a new record low for April, the Neckar at Wendlingen is already at medium low water, and in March there was only 37 per cent of the usual rainfall. There was no rain at all in April. The first drops are not expected to reach Baden-Württemberg until this weekend, perhaps bringing some relief.
It is high time to think about the long-term security of one of our most precious resources: drinking water, which in the south-west comes exclusively from springs, lakes, rivers and groundwater. A few years ago, the Ministry of the Environment began to draw up a master plan for water supply, analysing the current supply situation in all 1100 municipalities in the state and what they need to do to be able to provide sufficient drinking water in 2050, especially on days of peak demand.
Results are available for Böblingen and Rems-Murr districts
Results are currently available for two of the five batches in which the cities and municipalities are being processed – the results were recently presented for the first time at the ‘Extreme Weather Days Baden-Württemberg’ congress in Esslingen. For the Böblingen district, the conclusion is that the vast majority of municipalities would no longer be able to meet demand on peak days without countermeasures; in the Rems-Murr district, this applies to more than half of the municipalities. Stuttgart and the agglomerations in the Esslingen and Ludwigsburg districts are only now coming to the fore. Overall, according to Johanna Geilen, an advisor to the Ministry of the Environment, only a quarter of the municipalities in batch 1 and only around 40 per cent in batch 2 in the south-west have no need for action according to the current interim status.
There are many reasons for this. For example, only a good 20 per cent of local authorities have any real alternative supply if their mainstay, such as their own wells, fail. When they dry up, the crisis is there. In addition, there are often high water losses in the pipe network. Bernhard Röhrle, spokesman for the state’s water supply, says that up to 30 per cent of water is wasted by leaking through cracks into the ground. In addition, some local authorities have only limited rights to supply ‘long-distance water’, such as from Lake Constance or the Donauried. In the future, however, these volumes of water will often no longer be sufficient – and neither Lake Constance nor the state water supply companies are increasing their supply rights or accepting new customers.
This raises the question of what measures could be taken. Municipalities need to keep their networks in good condition. They may also have to develop their own water resources, for example by drilling more wells. And some need to lay new pipes to a neighbouring community so that they can be supplied from there in an emergency. All this is expensive and takes time.
Michael Dold knows a thing or two about this. He is the managing director of Aquavilla, which supplies drinking water to eleven towns and villages in the Black Forest. These include Furtwangen, St. Georgen and Triberg. The 390 springs in the Black Forest granite would quickly run dry if it didn’t rain for a long time, says Dold – there have already been water emergencies in 2015, 2018 and 2020, with some resettlement farms having to be supplied by lorry.
A new 16-kilometre pipeline has now been built from Furtwangen, which still has plenty of water thanks to the inflow from eight valleys. Many spring catchments have also been renovated. And water pollution is being tackled. Because people now live from hand to mouth, which means that rainwater has to be collected as spring water again very quickly, 90 per cent of the samples are now microbiologically suspect, says Dold. The price of water for citizens has doubled as a result of all these measures.
However, the whole of Baden-Württemberg is still a water-rich state, emphasises Joachim Bley of the State Institute for the Environment: “This is not comparable with Spain, for example.” But even in the south-west, groundwater recharge is predicted to fall by 15 to 25 per cent by 2050. So it’s not just local authorities that need to take action. It will also be about shading rivers with more trees, reducing sealed surfaces and developing water-efficient farming practices.
And it will also mean finding solutions to distribution disputes. At some point, politicians at federal and state level will have to decide who has to cut back when there is too little water – will farmers no longer be allowed to irrigate their fields, or will it be accepted that the rivers will carry hardly any water and the fish will die? “So far, everyone’s avoiding saying who won’t get any more water,” criticises Carsten Scholz of the State Nature Conservation Association.
Environment Minister Thekla Walker (Greens) still hopes it won’t come to that. Funding has been increased and the state will spend almost 64 million euros on water supply measures in 2025 alone. “A lack of water threatens our freedom,” says Walker. In parts of France, local authorities have recently banned the construction of new houses and the establishment of farms because the water supply is no longer sufficient: “We want to avoid such distribution conflicts in Baden-Württemberg.”
