The Danube is drying up. Europe still has no plan.

 

The Danube is drying up. Europe still has no plan.

 

Experts and green groups hope the Danube drought will be a wake-up call for EU policymakers.

 

August 21, 2026 6:00 am CET

By Jakob Weizman and Elena Giordano

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-danube-is-drying-up-europe-still-has-no-plan/

 

Detonating a riverbed and sinking barges. Welcome to Europe’s increasingly desperate efforts to keep one of the continent’s most important waterways working.

 

The Danube River reached dramatically low water levels this month, sending EU governments scrambling. Romanian authorities used explosives to steer more water toward the Cernavodă nuclear plant. The Hungarian government submerged vessels in a bid to keep water flowing past its own Paks nuclear plant. Some 180 tourists in Bulgaria had to be evacuated from a stranded ship near the port city of Vidin.

 

There’s a lot at stake. The Danube, Europe’s second-longest waterway, is a vital artery for freight, drinking water, agriculture and industry. It helps cool major nuclear plants and feeds hydropower projects. The river basin stretches across 19 countries and supports tens of millions of people. But recurring drought, driven by climate change, threatens to change all that. 

 

“The prediction is that this will occur more often, and we need to look more systematically at water availability, water demands, and of course retention and resilience,” said Birgit Vogel, executive secretary for the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, which coordinates cooperation among countries across the basin.

 

With drought becoming a recurring threat, Europe still doesn’t have a unified, binding policy to confront water shortages in the Danube and beyond. Responsibility remains split between national governments and river basin authorities, regulated by a patchwork of EU laws that green groups say are poorly enforced. Many of the bloc’s new resilience measures remain voluntary.

 

Against that backdrop, national authorities are resorting to unilateral measures that, some argue, could wreak havoc on their neighbors and nearby ecosystems.

 

Dimiter Koumanov, head of environmental protection at Bulgarian river NGO Balkanka, argues that countries are taking emergency action without considering the broader consequences. He is particularly concerned about the potential impact of such measures on Bulgaria’s drinking water.

 

Danube countries are “doing everything they wish, and we in Bulgaria are paying the price,” he said.

 

High stakes, low rivers

“This summer has been another reminder that Europe is badly underprepared for climate change,” said Sara Johansson, water policy expert at the European Environmental Bureau. “Drying soils, degraded wetlands and destroyed ecosystems are turning landscapes into tinderboxes ready to ignite, while depleted rivers have exposed the vulnerability of our energy system.”

 

The Hungarian Paks nuclear plant, which relies on the river for cooling, supplies around 40 percent of the country’s electricity, while Romania’s Cernavodă plant provides one-fifth of its power. When the river runs too low, governments aren’t just dealing with a water crisis — they also risk losing a major electricity source.

 

This month Hungary began construction on a riverbed sill — a dam-like structure — to raise water levels around Paks. It’s a “potentially useful short-term intervention to raise water levels upstream,” said Tamás Gruber, head of WWF Hungary’s Living Rivers program. “However, the available information is not sufficient to assess its full ecological consequences or its effectiveness under future extreme low-flow conditions.”

 

Such a structure could “worsen low-water conditions downstream and affect sediment transport, fish and other aquatic organisms,” he added.

 

Quick fixes to tackle the drought have largely remained national and fragmented across the seven EU member countries the Danube runs through, along with Serbia, Moldova and Ukraine.

 

Organizations that coordinate the river’s management do exist, like Vogel’s ICPDR commission. ICPDR countries also have national agencies responsible for shipping, water management and environmental protection. 

 

These agencies cooperate on monitoring and navigation — but ultimately operate within their own national jurisdictions.

 

Enter EU

The EU’s Water Framework Directive requires member countries to protect and restore the bloc’s rivers, lakes and groundwaters, and to coordinate water management across river basins rather than solely along national borders. But experts and water sector groups say the EU has failed to deliver a coordinated policy response to improve drought preparedness, with dry summers set to become more frequent and intense.

 

“The European Union is providing a framework. National governments can have a plan ... but most of the governance is done at the river basin level or at the local level,” said Loïc Charpentier, head of advocacy at lobby Water Europe. “That’s why you get this impression of, let’s say, non-coordinated action. You have some improvement to be done.”

 

Last year a group of scientists issued a call for an EU Drought Directive to “harmonize and enforce risk management policies across the continent.” That was in response to the drought of 2022.

 

The event “affected most of the continent [but] our findings show significant regional disparities in management capacity,” they wrote. “In many countries — particularly those with agriculture-dominated economies — drought responses remain short-term and reactive, often leading to potentially maladaptive practices.”

 

Brussels also unveiled a Water Resilience Strategy last year, containing some 50 measures to improve water security in the bloc. The strategy included a promise from the European Commission to give member countries technical guidance on how to draw up drought management plans — but those aren’t mandatory.

 

A key EU nature law also commits the bloc to achieving 25,000 kilometers of free-flowing rivers in Europe by 2030, meaning those unhindered by artificial barriers such as hydropower dams — but again, it will be mostly “up to the member states how much they want to contribute [toward that goal],” WWF Austria river protection expert Marie Pfeiffer said.

 

And as part of its ongoing mission to cut red tape and boost EU industry Brussels plans to revise the Water Framework Directive, with a focus on relaxing water protection rules for mining. Environmental NGOs warn the directive is already inconsistently enforced.

 

Asked about the Danube drought, Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told POLITICO it’s “imperative to step up our preparedness across the board,” adding that the EU also needs to “evaluate whether our current EU water legislation remains fit for purpose from the angle of resilience, preparedness, water reuse and drought management” — hinting at the incoming revision. 

 

Gergely Patkó, an analyst for the Hungarian Water Utility Association, asserts that there’s “good cooperation between river basin authorities in different countries, and the Water Framework Directive supports this coordination.” Still, he warned that revising the directive could put more strain on drinking water during drought crises.

 

Koumanov, the Bulgarian non-profit expert, said the best solution is to “follow the EU legal framework by the book and make it more stringent, aiming at better protection of the natural water resources, but I also know that this is Utopia for the moment.

 

“Someday the wooden heads in the EU will learn the lesson and I hope that it will not be too late.”