No, Poland’s Vistula river isn’t drying up – but it does face mounting environmental threats

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

By Wojciech Kość

There has hardly been a day since August without Polish media running alarming headlines about Poland’s longest river, the Vistula, drying up.

Although in September its water level did reach a record low of just 4cm at one measuring station in Warsaw, such reports largely failed to explain what the figure means in practice and what factors are behind the river’s sorry state.

The Vistula is not close to running dry. But a combination of warming climate, poor water management and commercial exploitation poses a threat to the river, which is the main source of water for residents of Warsaw and many other towns and cities as well as a precious ecosystem that provides a habitat for migratory birds and protected species such as beavers.

The Vistula’s 1,047-kilometre course lies entirely within Poland. It flows through Kraków, the country’s second-largest city and a major tourist destination, then passes through Warsaw before reaching the Baltic Sea in the historic city of Gdańsk.

Although large, the river has seen very little human intervention, making it an unusual case in Europe, where rivers are often artificially “regulated” through, among other activities, course straightening and bank reinforcement. In Warsaw, its right bank has been left in its natural state and is part of the European Union-wide Natura 2000 protection network.

In 2023, Klub Przyrodników (Naturalists’ Club), an NGO, proposed creating a national park along a 120-kilometre stretch of the Vistula between Warsaw and the city of Płock, which would give it the highest form of nature protection and preserve large swathes of ecologically valuable areas.

But such a park remains a distant goal, as strict rules have blocked the creation of any new national park in Poland for nearly 25 years. More pressing are the immediate challenges facing the river, which reflect a wider environmental crisis.

For weeks, water levels at the Vistula boulevards measuring station – located near the Copernicus Science Centre in central Warsaw – have not risen above 15cm. On 3 September, the level dropped to a record low of 4cm.

While worrying, that number needs context, and this is where the situation becomes more concerning, experts say.

“What we see in the river is really the final outcome, which is a combination of many factors, the changing climate being the most important of them,” says Paweł Rowiński, Director of the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN).

“We have to remember that winters now bring almost no snow. That means we no longer have the natural reservoir of water that snow provides. In effect, we start each new season with deepening water deficits,” Rowiński adds.

Little or no snow in winter means less water seeps into the ground in spring, lowering the water table, which is the main source of Polish rivers. This, in turn, leaves smaller rivers at risk of drying up.

“These rivers shrink, first losing the flow at the source or at the mouth, and then along their entire course,” explains Daniel Petryczkiewicz, a photographer and activist who has campaigned for stronger protections of the River Mała, a small stream just south of Warsaw, which he says has been dry since July.

Under normal conditions, the Mała would feed the Jeziorka, a tributary of the Vistula. But as tributaries dry, the Vistula is also affected. The falling groundwater table impacts all rivers within the Vistula basin, which covers about half of Poland.

“The Vistula gets all the attention but what we really see there is the result of its entire basin collapsing,” adds Petryczkiewicz.

“A measuring station shows the water level at a single point. If you get more similarly low measurements, it is concerning,” says Rowiński. “If you also see that the water flow is smaller than the long-term average, a picture emerges that something’s not quite right with the river as a whole.”

Rowiński explains that September’s 4cm measurement was not the river’s depth, but rather how much water there was relative to the station’s fixed zero level near the bottom of the river bed. “You need to pair it with the water flow data to see a clearer picture of the situation.”

In early September, the Vistula carried around 150 cubic metres of water per second in central Warsaw, well below the long-term average low of 220.

According to Warsaw city council member Jan Mencwel, decades of unregulated sand extraction have also taken a toll. Millions of tonnes have been removed from the river since the postwar years, first for the reconstruction of Warsaw – where 85% of buildings were damaged or destroyed during World War Two – and now mainly for real estate and infrastructure.

“Some three million tonnes of sand are being extracted annually from the Vistula, lowering the river bed and, effectively, the water level,” says Mencwel.

Changing rainfall patterns compound the problem. Poland may still receive roughly the same annual rainfall as it has over the past 30 years, but steady drizzle has been replaced by sudden, heavy downpours that the soil cannot absorb and retain as groundwater.

Urban development, which replaces green areas with built-up surfaces, speeds water runoff further. Extreme rainfall now causes flash floods. In September 2024, southwestern Poland was hit by such floods. In Warsaw, record rain fell on 19-20 August last year, when nearly 120 millimetres fell in a few hours, double the monthly average.

No matter how hard it might rain, higher temperatures accelerate evaporation, leaving Poland losing water overall, climatologists say. “Poland’s climate has warmed by at least 2.1 degrees Celsius since the 1950s,” says Szymon Malinowski, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Warsaw.

Recent data from state weather institute IMGW, covering last year’s warm season from May to October, show that most of Poland had a deeply negative climatic water balance – a measure comparing precipitation with water loss through evaporation and plant transpiration.

Last year’s figures showed water deficits of more than 400 millimetres along Poland’s eastern border with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, as well as in central areas, including Warsaw.

That shortage affects ecosystems, farming and households. Each summer, there are growing numbers of local restrictions on water use. In one example, the town of Mszana Dolna banned tap water use at night in August, though the ban has since been lifted.

The Vistula continues to flow and supplies around 2.5 million people in Warsaw with water. But water retention must become a priority, or the city may one day face dry taps, says Mateusz Grygoruk, a hydrologist at Warsaw University of Life Sciences and deputy chair of the National Water Management Council.

“We must take into account that at some point, as the low levels deepen, water intake in Warsaw will have to be reduced. In the long term, that is precisely the scenario,” Grygoruk says.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Wojciech Kość is a journalist covering Poland for bne IntelliNews. He also reports for Politico Europe and OKO.press, with a particular focus on energy and climate issues, as well as nature protection.

Main image credit: Zbigniew Panow/Miasto Warszawa