📉In my last posts I talked about the need to rewet Germany’s drained swamps. While this is very important to reduce our climate damaging emissions as well as gives us new land to accelerate Germany’s energy transition, there is a big problem that isn’t talked about enough: Europe’s groundwater crisis.

🌫 As part of EU´s Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product (G3P), researchers of the University of Technology Graz in Austria have, after extensive work, shown that Europe is suffering from extreme draughts since 2018. While the situation is manageable in southern Europe, Central Europe and especially Germany have a huge problem. For their findings, the researchers used data collected by two satellites called Tom and Jerry, which have measured the gravitational acceleration from which large changes in mass can be deducted which in turn show changes in groundwater levels.

⚠For the energy transition this has many effects, but I just want to mention two: rewatering swamps will not be as easy as opening a few valves. We need to carefully handle our water resources here to make sure water will not be missed on other ends. And clean energy from hydrogen will not be as easily producible as you might think. It’s clear we are in desperate need for more water e.g. the production of 1,0 kg Hydrogen needs 9-10 liters of water. The desalination of sea water is part of the solution, but we always need to make sure we are aware that water is becoming a critical resource even in Germany.

❓Are you aware of Europe’s groundwater crisis? Should this be discussed more?