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 a portfolio of grant programmes commonly grouped as the fight against drought ("boj proti suchu"), paying municipalities, farmers and private landowners to restore water-retention capacity in the landscape. The push intensified after the country experienced what a 2020 USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report called its worst drought in roughly 500 years, with successive dry years through 2018-2019 damaging crops, forests and drinking-water supplies.

By early 2020 the Ministry reported having supported about 18,000 projects since 2014 worth roughly CZK 13 billion (about EUR 520 million), including 480 water-source-strengthening projects since 2016 (CZK 534 million, serving over 300,000 residents). In 2019 alone the programme financed 100 new ponds, fishponds or wetlands, 54,000 newly planted trees, 814 other landscape-renewal projects, 359 km of new drinking-water pipeline connecting 281,000 people, and 3,164 m2 of new green roofs; a further CZK 1 billion covering 217 new stream-revitalisation, pond and tree-row projects was approved in early 2020.

The programme's ecosystem-based share of drought spending is nonetheless a minority of the state's total drought response: Czech ministries together spent about CZK 26.8 billion on anti-drought measures in 2023, of which only around CZK 1 billion went to natural landscape restoration and rainwater management and about CZK 500 million to pond and small-reservoir work, with the bulk of the 2023 total (over CZK 20 billion, mostly via the Agriculture Ministry) spent on conventional water infrastructure such as pipelines, treatment plants and sewerage rather than nature-based measures.

Read the full analysis: https://mzp.gov.cz/cz/pro-media-a-verejnost/aktuality/archiv-tiskovych-zprav/mzp-od-roku-2014-podporilo-18-tisic-projektu