LADANY-VOLGY, Hungary, Oct 9 (Reuters) - In a bone-dry valley in Hungary, forest workers and volunteers piled up terraces of logs and deadwood, hoping to catch any trickles of water that make it down the hillside when the rains finally come.
In other areas, other groups fanned out, building barriers across streams and small creeks — their own man-made "beaver dams" designed to pool water and prepare the landscape for an even hotter, drier future.
As of this week, they were still waiting for that rain after a drought-hit summer that brought river levels to record lows, disrupting everything from cargo barges to the country's Paks nuclear plant, which relies on flows of cooling water from the Danube.
But the teams working under the banner of the grassroots, volunteer "Water Guardians Movement" kept on building, getting ready.
'WE CAN IMPROVE THE SITUATION'
"The wells (on my farm) have practically run dry," said Bence Bardos, a forest engineer leading the team building terraces in the Ladany valley in eastern Hungary near the border with Slovakia.
"This is the impact from climate change and our special geography in the Carpathian basin."
There was little locals could do about that, he said. "But we can improve the situation by small steps, by reversing the water runoff and drainage," the 36-year-old added.
The volunteers are turning out in their hundreds to help the country build structures to retain rainwater and restore wetlands — techniques that mark a sharp turnaround from the past, when programmes focused on managing floods, not droughts.
Nearly a quarter of the country lies on floodplains, and experts spent decades draining wetlands and building canals to channel water away from the fields and open up more land for agriculture.
"We have regulated our rivers, cutting their bends, which means the rivers flow faster, which drains ground water nearby," Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a professor at the Central European University in Vienna, said.
Much of that now needed to go into reverse. The important thing now was to "restore the original natural conditions as much as possible, to allow rivers to flow on longer routes and thus slower, and retain ground water in the winter-spring," Ürge-Vorsatz added.
The government announced a new strategy in August which prioritised "natural water retention methods" and, far from draining fields, said some farmland should be deliberately flooded.
RESEARCHERS 'CAN'T PERFORM A RAIN DANCE'
Agriculture, one of the planks of Hungary's economy, has borne the brunt of the drier conditions.
Many farmers have given up on maize and shifted to alternatives, as researchers work on drought-resistant varieties.
This was the first year when the harvested area of maize in Hungary fell below the area planted with sunflowers, said Zoltan Kende, associate professor at the Institute of Agronomy at the MATE University.
But even sunflowers have suffered from the drought.
"We have shown that dry weather alters the fatty acid composition of sunflowers, resulting in a change in oil quality," Kende added.
Researchers could not "perform a rain dance" but there were recommendations they could make on cultivation and other methods to help adaptation, he said.
"For each cultivated plant species, we investigate the optimal factors as for temperature, moisture ... that result in the fastest germination. This approach helps enhance resilience against drought damage."
Hungary's central bank has said the drought damage to agriculture would cut economic growth by 0.4 percentage points in 2026.
The challenges were already there to see as the volunteers worked on the slopes of Ladany valley.
Borbala Kanizsay, who was there with her husband, said the creek that ran past their nearby house ran dry in May for the first time she could remember. Most of her parched trees shed their leaves in July.
A "terrible sight," the 41-year-old added. "We must adapt to this situation that our climate has changed, and we must strive to keep Hungary a liveable place."
(Writing by Krisztina Than, Reporting by Marton Monus and Krisztina Than, Editing by Andrew Heavens)
