Dialogue on Water and Agriculture

Climate change is altering the water balance in rural areas (UBA, 2019d). The consequences of climate change and a decreasing water supply, especially in the summer months, will particularly affect agriculture and forestry. Adaptation of agriculture and forestry to the changing climatic conditions will have an impact on nature and the environment, including water bodies.

Regional models of water-compatible agriculture and forestry enable a regionally and locally adapted differentiation of management measures in terms of high ecological effectiveness with economic efficiency. For comparable statements in all regions of Germany, a standardised methodology is necessary to create specific models of the regional, near-natural water balance.

To achieve this, Fresh Thoughts, together with SVK, organised further dialogues between agriculture and water management, the practitioner dialogues.

The objectives of the dialogue were:

• To reach an understanding of the tasks to be solved, including a linguistic understanding;
• The identification of causal connections between agricultural production and the natural site conditions;
• The development of generally valid evaluation criteria for describing individual agricultural productions on the surrounding landscape;
• The derivation of models for specific landscapes and agricultural production adapted to them;
• The schematic representation of regional agricultural production models concerning the consequences of climate change and water and soil protection.

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