Czech State Environmental Fund's Anti-Drought Landscape Water Retention Programme

Since 2014 the State Environmental Fund of the Czech Republic (SFZP CR), under the Ministry of the Environment, has run grant programmes helping municipalities, farmers and private landowners restore landscape water-retention capacity. Investment intensified after the country's 2018-2019 drought, described as its worst in roughly 500 years.

Restore landscape-level water retention to build drought resilience, through pond and wetland construction, stream renaturalization, tree planting, green roofs and drinking-water infrastructure.

Funding pond, wetland and fishpond construction; stream renaturalization; tree planting; green-roof installation; drinking-water pipeline development; and broader landscape-renewal projects for municipalities, farmers and private landowners.

Since 2014, roughly 18,000 projects have been supported with about CZK 13 billion (~EUR 520 million) in total investment. In 2019 alone the programme supported 100 new ponds/wetlands/fishponds, planted 54,000 trees, funded 814 landscape projects, built 359 km of drinking-water pipeline serving 281,000 people, and installed 3,164 m² of green roofs. In early 2020, CZK 1 billion was approved for 217 further stream-revitalization, pond and tree-row projects. Separately, 480 water-source projects (since 2016) served over 300,000 residents for CZK 534 million. By 2023, total Czech drought-related spending reached CZK 26.8 billion, though nature-based measures made up only about CZK 1.5 billion of that.

The programme has generated strong quantified output data (project counts, expenditure) demonstrating scale of activity, but sources document no carbon-sequestration monitoring, only indirect biodiversity outcomes, no fire-resilience component, and note that nature-based measures remain a minority share of total national drought spending.