On 4 September 2024, the 5th Sustainable World 2024 conference was held in Budapest, Hungary, to address the key issues of sustainability and green renewal. The event brought together policy makers, practitioners, ESG managers and business leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development.
The conference was divided into several sessions to address the key themes. Green agriculture and water is a new topic of the Sustainable World 2024 conference, with water security now receiving special attention alongside green agriculture. Climate change is one of the most pressing issues affecting our daily lives, and water management is particularly exposed in terms of drinking water supply and agriculture, so there is no doubt that a sustainability approach must also play a major role in this area. The extremes of climate change will fundamentally change our water management. Unfortunately, the effects of human interference and significant overproduction cannot be ignored.
Szilvia Simon, hydrogeologist, presented her sudy “Managed aquifer recharge as a nature-based solution for complex water scarcity management” in the section on Green Agriculture and Water Security. In her presentation, she pointed out that only a complex approach, possibly combining surface and subsurface methods, can provide an effective solution to the problem. A particularly important solution could be the use of the nature-based MAR (Managed Aquifer Recharge) method, whereby subsurface recharge is based on knowledge of groundwater flows, and can therefore achieve significant results at the regional level. The method is a new innovation registered as NaBa-MAR (Nature Based MAR) as a service study by ELTE, and its application could be a way forward in the fight against water scarcity.
Szilvia Simon while presenting
The study received funding from the European Commission and Ministry of Culture and Innovation of Hungary from National Research, Development and Innovation Fund; the Irish Enviromental Protection Agency; the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Agencia Española de Investigación (AEI) in the frame of the collaborative international consortium ClimEx-PE financed under the 2022 Joint call of the European Partnership 101060874 — Water4All.
The research was funded by the National Multidisciplinary Laboratory for Climate Change, RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00014 project.