R I V E R S

Singing the Danube blues

by Colin Woodard

YEARS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION have left the Danube a mess...


Europe's grandest waterway, the 2600-kilometer Danube River and its vast network of tributaries, has long served as a convenient sewer for half the continent. Starting at its source in western Germany, fertilizers, pesticides, and manure drain off farmlands and into the river system. Budapest, Bratislava and Belgrade discharge virtually all their sewage directly into the river without treatment, as does virtually every other community in the drainage basin south of the Austrian border. Industrial discharges from smelters, paper mills, chemical plants, and tanneries have devastated dozens of tributaries and contaminated water supplies. It all feeds into the Danube, which empties into the dying waters of the Black Sea.

But a major international effort to address the Danube's environmental problems is underway. After decades of political division, eight Danubian countries, the EC, UN, and international financing organizations established the Environmental Program for the Danube Basin, a multilateral program to strengthen and coordinate environmental management across the entire basin. Part of the effort is the Danube Grants Program administered by the REC. Financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), this program provides funding to NGOs and NGO networks working on Danube-related environmental issues.

It's an enormous undertaking. The Danube basin is huge - 817,000 square kilometers encompassing all of Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia and parts of eleven other countries from Switzerland to Moldova. Relations between many of the countries are strained or poorly developed, and the Yugoslav War has made comprehensive management impossible. Like any multilateral undertaking, the Danube Basin Program has plodded along, much of its resources spent hosting meetings and turning out studies rather than supporting needed investments.

Despite the bureaucracy, some progress has been made. In June 1994, eight Danubian countries and the European Union signed the Danube River Protection Convention, which obliges members to take measures to reduce pollution and conserve water resources. According to Richard Holland of the Danube Program Coordination Unit, three or four countries have already ratified the convention and most of the others are slated to do so in 1996.

"The task force has brought the [Danubian] countries together in a cooperative environment," adds Istvan Tokes, head of the international relations department of the Hungarian Ministry of Environment and Regional Planning. "The convention serves as an excellent reference point to establishing better bilateral relations between countries that, historically, have not always had the best relationships."

Most members of the Danube Basin Program are finishing comprehensive action plans which identify priority pollution "hot spots" and recommend implementable solutions. These strategies include passing better environmental legislation, training environmental managers and building the capacity of governments and NGOs to tackle the Danube dilemma.

Just one problem: nobody's quite sure who is going to pay the bill. "It's been clear for some time that 90-95% of all environmental investments will have to be supported from local resources," Tokes says. "Whenever a list of hot spots is drafted, the banks offer financing, but the former-socialist countries often aren't in a position to take on more loans."

The Project Preparation Committee (PPC), an EBRD-hosted secretariat that matches donors with environment-related projects, may help the process along. Meetings are underway to restructure the PPC's decisionmaking process. If this happens, and the Danube PCU's Holland thinks it likely, Danube-specific projects will stand a better chance of finding the funding that has so far been elusive. But there is one drawback: to date, the PPC has only been able to offer loans at market prices, and as Tokes points out, this may not be palatable to heavily indebted countries in CEE.

Hungary moves forward

Despite Tokes's pessimistic caution, Hungary is in better financial shape than many other CEE countries to make the necessary improvements. Revenues from the Central Environmental Fund will be made available to support prescribed investments. The Fund, in which are deposited all environmental packaging fees, pollution fines, and the proceeds of the petrol tax, has already accumulated some Ft 3 billion from petrol fees alone, according to Mr. Tokes.

But Hungary's Ministry of Environment will have its work cut out for it. The Strategic Action Plan identifies 29 "hot-spots" in Hungary, and the suggested direct investments total nearly USD 1 billion. The vast majority of investments are for the construction, completion or upgrading of municipal waste water treatment plants in virtually every sizable town in the country. Other "hot-spots" include MOL's oil refinery at Szazhalombata, the tailing dump at Pecs' Mecsek Uranium Mines, contaminated groundwater at the Lehel factory in Jaszbereny, several power plants, and the reconstruction of critical wetlands on Lake Balaton.

...BUT CITIZENS AND GOVERNMENTS alike are chipping in to bring the river back to life.


Budapest has by far the largest investment in the Action Plan: a USD 540 million upgrade of the city's sewage treatment system, that will greatly expand treatment capacity, though these costs do not include necessary expansion of the sewer network. Currently only 25% of Budapest's sewage receives biological treatment; the remainder is screened for large particles and released into the river. High fecal matter content in the river is the main reason that health authorities ban swimming in its main branch.

"The section of the river from Vienna to Budapest is one of the most critical sections of the Danube. This is the most populated section of the river and, as a consequence, the pollution inputs are the highest and the water quality requirements are the strictest," says Peter Literathy, director of the VITUKI Institute for Water Pollution Control near Csepel Island. "People here depend on the quality of water from the Danube."

The Hungarian section of the Danube suffers from a wide-range of pollution discharges, but the natural cleansing properties of the river have been able to keep pace. "If you look at most major categories of pollution, the pollution levels in the main river are about the same at Rajka [where the river enters Hungary from Austria] and Mohacs [where the river enters Serbia]," Mr. Literathy says. "If we proceed with environmental investments now, while the industrial sector is still dormant, then Hungary may even become a net "cleaner" of the main river. The big problems lie with the tributaries."

Budapest, for instance, receives the vast majority of its drinking water from deep "bank-filtered" wells north and south of the city, the largest such scheme in Europe. The deep gravel beds of the Danube are an invaluable resource, as they act as a natural filter protecting the subsurface aquifers under the riverbed. From these wells, Budapest and other communities can draw drinking water without treatment. This supply is supplemented by direct intake from the Danube (which does require treatment), water that is particularly vulnerable to pollution discharges.

Protecting these hydrological resources and reducing the pollution load in the Black Sea are the underlying goals of the Strategic Action Plan. The Plan has been criticized, however, for its overwhelming emphasis on treatment plants and other "end-of-the-pipe" solutions. "Based on the studies, many people felt that a greater pollution decrease could be achieved by addressing agricultural pollution," says Dalibor Kysela, who served on the Danube Basin Program's coordinating task force. "The financing institutions want to have a clear contract with somebody, however, and thus the interest in waste water treatment plants. These plants allow the World Bank to draw up a business contract with some company to build a specified structure. Other types of investments wouldn't be nearly as straightforward, or there would be no bank involvement at all.... There's a general feeling that the funders are the ones who've set the priorities."

"We need waste water treatment, but this is only part of the whole picture," says Gyorgy Droppa, director of the environmental group Danube Circle. "There are a number of other important elements that haven't been given proper attention - the effects of shipping, of dams, damage to wildlife. I'm very disappointed with the way it has been handled." True, perhaps, but responsibility lies with the Danubian governments themselves. "The hot spots were chosen by the respective ministries of environment in each country," says Bo Wingard of the Danube Basin Program's Project implementation unit in Vienna. "The criticism that the availability of project financing may have influenced governments to concentrate on waste water treatment may well be valid."

THE BULLETIN * WINTER 1995