Storing water near the Source

Many areas in Europe wrestle with high-water problems. TV programmes deluged European households with pictures of rivers in full spate: the Meuse and the Rhine in 1993 and 1995, the Elbe in 1998 and 2002, numerous rivers in Northern Italy, Switzerland and Central England in 2000, the Tisza in Hungary in 1999 and 2001. But this year almost the whole of Europe had to contend with a serious low water problem;water levels in rivers kept subsiding to an all-time low and made waterways barely navigable. Only few recognize that these problems are connected, and that a sustainable solution cannot be found in a new round of technical interventions. We need a new approach to ease both droughts and floods.