Too much/little water in the catchment area – A common value and a challenge

For the third time, on 18-19 June 2019, Climate Adaptation Training was held within the framework of the LIFE-MICACC project entitled “Municipalities as integrators and coordinators in adaptation to climate change”, this time in Lajosmizse, for the leaders and staff of interested municipalities involved in the catchment area of the five partner municipalities involved in the project.

The aim of the training was to provide participants with knowledge on climate change and adaptation. In addition, we aimed to present the achievements of the partner municipalities so far, to involve the municipalities in the river basins as closely as possible, to build partnerships on river basin level and to exchange views and experiences. On the first day, the participants were greeted by Dr. Miklós Dukai, Deputy State Secretary for Municipal Affairs, Ministry of Interior. In his opening speech, he emphasized that climate change is a global challenge and the local governments have a key role adapting to it on local level and have an important role in coordinating adaptation and local actions. The first day’s presentations were held by Csaba Vaszkó, climate change expert and trainer, and Mátyás Farkas, member of World Wide Fund for Nature Hungary Foundation. The presenters provided information about the trends of our country’s climate change, its effects on temperature, precipitation, and the frequency of extreme weather conditions. 

After the theoretical introduction, mastering the basic concepts of the topic and understanding the elements of climate change, a discussion started on adaptation options among those present.  During the day, a monthly timeline was prepared with the help of the participants, in which each local municipality’s representative recorded the month(s) in which an unusual weather anomaly occurred. After this, through practical exercises, participants learned the basics of vulnerability assessment and worked together to find possible solutions to the water-related challenges of a highland and lowland settlement.

On June 19, the second day of the training, Csaba Vaszkó and Mátyás Farkas presented the results of the previous results of the vulnerability assessments on settlement level and detailed the method for the preparation of the catchment level vulnerability assessment. This was followed by interesting and detailed professional presentations by experts from the sector (Dr. Andrea Bíróné Kircsi, Dr. Anna Páldy, Iván Balla, Zoltán Sirkó, Dr. Julianna Szabó, Dr. Kálmán Buzás). The experts presented on different specializations related to the topic, covering meteorology, healthcare, water management, environment management and agriculture, urban planning and municipal rainwater management.

(Presentations can be downloaded from the Documents menu in pdf format, in Hungarian.)

The training ended with planned closing remarks and an unplanned rainstorm. This later extreme weather event also illustrates perfectly the challenge we are increasingly facing in our daily lives, or even in the news, to which we must jointly find possible answers.

The municipalities involved in the training have all recognized this and have the intention to do so in order to mitigate the negative effects of climate change in their own settlement or river basin.

The second two days of the training are scheduled for November 2019. According to the training topic, basin-wide vulnerability studies will be completed by then (for the five river basins concerned), which will also be presented by the project partners involved,  together with expert advice.

Written by Zsuzsanna Hercig, András Torda