The Danube Day, the celebration of the Danube Basin countries is on the 29th of June each year. On this day we jointly commemorate one of Europe's greatest river systems and the people and wildlife that rely on it. The Danube Floodplain project is one of our opportunities to improve our relationship with the Danube and its tributaries, and make steps for a new floodplain and river treatment.

No one doubts the significance of our rivers due to their various and precious functions which serve humanity since ancient times. Also, adaptation to river dynamics and the concept of a wisely used river ecosystem posed always various challenges for people. It is not different in the case of the Danube River, which connects a significant part of Europe – it flows through 10 countries until it reaches the Black Sea.

Our relationship with the Danube

The Danube is the second longest European river with a length of 2850 km, and affecting the lives of 81 million people. Its several potentials are widely used from providing drinking water through navigation until fishing, recreation or irrigation purposes. The Danube functions also as a habitat for great numbers of species and maintains less visible but not less important regulating services just like climate regulation, dilution and buffering various pollutions, soil production or flood risk mitigation.

However, its natural dynamics was heavily altered in past decades for various purposes and mainly due to this activity 80% of its floodplains and wetlands have been lost. Nowadays it becomes much clearer, which of these alterations did not really serve provisioning of the various services. This means a baseline not just for regulation of crucial natural systems but also a basic need for living and leisure.

For a long time we took covering these services as evidence and we highly overloaded river ecosystems which means, it cannot provide fully the same scope of services any more. With lots of investigations on the complex connections of the natural processes became also clearer that functioning of river systems is based on sensible balances and also, it is not easy to capture the complex system as an economic subject.

New efforts with floodplain restorations

In Danube Floodplain project new efforts on a complex floodplain management are made which are to give not only value for ecosystem services of the rivers and their floodplains but to develop new management strategies and steps for a floodplain and river treatment and usage which serves better a healthy ecosystem and ultimately, the human needs.

The project is an opportunity for many different stakeholders of the Danube River and its tributaries to find a common understanding of the problems and try to find an integrated, cross-border solution for threat that water scarcity and excess water poses for ecosystems and people.