The consequences of climate change in the Czech Republic

Created: 12/25/2021, 3:17 PM

From: Aleksandra Fedorska

in Mann photographs his dog on a rock with a view of the Melnik power plant operated by CEZ, the largest electricity producer in the Czech Republic.

© Tomas Tkacik / dpa

Climate change has long since arrived in Central Europe.

Between 2014 and 2020 it was more dry in the Czech Republic than ever before.

The effects can be felt in the energy sector.

• The Czech Republic * was hit by a severe drought between 2014 and 2020

• Despite having many rivers, the Czech Republic is an arid country

• Wetlands and rivers barely fulfill their functions

• Industrial agriculture and monoculture promote soil erosion and the sinking of the groundwater

• The Czech energy industry uses a lot of water to cool nuclear and coal-fired power plants

Prague - For the Czech Republic, the years 2014 to 2020 were the driest in all of Czech history.

Since the beginning of the weather records, there have never been such hot and dry years.

The drought then paused in 2020/2021.

It is to be hoped that the Czech Republic will use this time to prepare for further drought.

According to the experts, this could worsen in the medium term.

The main cause is climate change *, but also other unfavorable factors that have made the Czech Republic particularly vulnerable to drought.

In May 2020, the Czech President Miloš Zeman * said that the drought will hit the Czech Republic harder than the corona pandemic *.

Zeman suggested investing more in water tanks and dams.

The climate and dwindling water resources

The Czech Republic is one of the most arid countries in the European Union.

For hydrologists, this has to do with the fact that it is a region that is located a little higher and thus the water-bearing rivers (Elbe, Oder, Danube) leave the region and flow away relatively quickly.

The runoff means that less water can be held by the ground, which has a negative effect on the water table.

The climate researcher Miroslav Trnka, who teaches at the University in Brno and researches at the Academy of Sciences, is of the opinion that the Czech Republic is significantly more affected by global warming than other countries due to the given climatic developments. Climate change leads to global changes in weather patterns that bring humid air to Central Europe less often than before.

The consequences are already clearly visible in agriculture and forestry.

Trnka believes that Czech politics has paid too little attention to the problem in recent years.

For a long time, it was not drought but the danger of floods that was the most important issue in the Czech water management.

The major rivers frequently overflowed and caused severe flooding.

They were then straightened and the banks were sealed.

As a result, the Czech Republic lost around 80% of its wetlands and floodplains.

The river bed changes resulted in natural river courses being shortened by 30%.

As a result, entire regions were drained over the long term.

Agriculture and Forestry

In contrast to neighboring Poland *, Czech agriculture is characterized by large areas of cultivation. While a Polish farmer cultivates an average of 11.1 hectares, this area is ten times as large in the Czech Republic. Large agricultural groups such as Agrofert, which is owned by former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, are on the rise in the Czech Republic. The large farms mainly rely on wheat and rapeseed. This promotes the monoculture of Czech agriculture and promotes one-sided fertilization. The soils are less and less able to bind the scarce water they receive. It flows off quickly without getting into the groundwater.

Monoculture cultivation is common not only in Czech agriculture, but also in forestry. Instead of deciduous trees, the spruce dominates in the Czech Republic. Around 70% of the trees in Czech forests are conifers. This tree species is a godsend for the bark beetle, which decimated the Czech forests during the 2014-2020 drought. The only remedy for the stubborn pest is massive logging, which slows the beetle from spreading. Instead of the forest, large fallow and unprotected areas are created. This exacerbates the problem of soil erosion in many regions.

Precisely because of the catastrophic situation with the bark beetle infestation, however, measures have now been taken to promote deciduous trees.

The proportion of deciduous trees in newly forested areas is now up to 40%.

However, it will take decades for forest areas to emerge from this.

Cooling function in the power plants

Although the hydropower plants in the Czech Republic are not systemically relevant, their performance decreased by up to 50 percent in the particularly dry years. The water is not only a source of energy, but also represents an existentially important component of the Czech energy mix because of its cooling function, with the country relying on coal-fired power stations and one third each on nuclear power stations. In the Czech Republic, the cooling process is usually carried out in so-called cooling towers. But here, too, enough cool water must be refilled in order to be able to maintain the cooling.

The existing nuclear reactors in Temelín and Dukovany are well prepared against water shortages, as dams were built on the nearby Vltava and Jihlava rivers at an early stage. For the planned construction of another block in Dukovany, however, such security measures are probably no longer possible. Experts fear that the Jihlava River could dry up within a year if the water was used for cooling purposes. The expansion of the nuclear power plant in Temelin is also being discussed critically against the background of the lack of cooling water in the Vltava.

In future, however, the situation in connection with the water demand in the energy industry should calm down.

Like many other countries, the Czech Republic is implementing a fuel switch towards natural gas.

The old coal piles are then to be replaced by gas-fired power plants and renewable energy sources.

The problem of cooling water should therefore ease significantly in the future.