Landscape and watershed Recovery Programme for the Košice Region of Slovakia

The Kosice region (6,754 km2, south-east Slovakia) faces combined climate-change and land-management impacts: summer temperatures have risen up to 2C (in August), precipitation patterns are shifting, and large-scale monoculture farming (Slovak fields average 12 hectares versus the EU average of 3.9 hectares) degrades soil water-retention capacity. The region loses over 120 million m3/year of stormwater runoff from impervious and degraded land, increasing flood and heatwave risk; Kosice also records some of Slovakia's highest asthma and bronchitis rates, linked to air pollution.

Increase landscape water-retention capacity (targeting about half of extreme, 50-100-year-return rainfall) to mitigate floods, recharge groundwater for drought resilience, reduce soil and nutrient loss, sequester carbon and cool the environment, across forest, agricultural and urban land.

The regional government's Restoration Programme (adopted 19 February 2021, developed since 2018) plans 60 million m3 of water-retention and groundwater-recharge structures (infiltration basins, bioretention, swales, check dams, permeable paving, green roofs, and similar measures) across about 700,000 hectares, coordinated via six new Water and Land Restoration Advisory Boards and an Umbrella Regional Water Board, building on a predecessor 2010-2012 national Revitalisation Programme.

The Programme's own projections (not yet realised, pending full implementation) estimate: 12,000 l/s of aquifer recharge, average regional cooling of 0.7C (1.3C in cities), 1.8 million tonnes of soil/biomass carbon sequestration, 3,200 new jobs and EUR 32 million/year in additional crop-yield value, at an estimated EUR 408 million cost over ten years. The 2010-2012 predecessor programme built 250,000 m3 of green infrastructure/rainwater-harvesting works in the Kosice region alone, estimated by the NGO People and Water to have delivered about 12 million m3 of rainwater-retention benefit since 2010; however, that programme ended after using only 4% of allocated funds, and no monitoring was put in place before funding was suspended.

The current Programme builds on the demonstrated, if unmonitored, benefits of the 2010-2012 predecessor. Key constraints include unresolved land-ownership questions (large farms collectivised in the 1950s), insufficient secured funding for monitoring and gauging stations, limited CAP subsidy support for water-retention measures, and the need for cross-ministerial coordination; the COVID-19 pandemic also delayed stakeholder meetings in 2021.