Climate Change and Sustainability: Inspiring Presentations at Sustainable World Conference 2024

On September 4, 2024, Budapest, Hungary hosted the 5th Sustainable World 2024 conference, focusing on the pivotal issues of sustainability and green renewal. This event gathered policymakers, practitioners, ESG managers, and business leaders to explore the challenges and opportunities in sustainable development.

The conference featured multiple sessions, each dedicated to key themes. Notably, this year’s conference introduced the topic of Green Agriculture and Water Security, highlighting the critical importance of water management alongside sustainable farming. Climate change, a pressing issue impacting our daily lives, poses significant challenges to water management, particularly in drinking water supply and agriculture. Addressing these challenges with a sustainability-focused approach is essential. The extremes brought about by climate change are set to fundamentally alter our water management practices, and the impacts of human interference and overproduction cannot be overlooked.

In the Green Agriculture and Water Security session, hydrogeologist Szilvia Simon (ELTE) presented her study titled “Managed Aquifer Recharge as a Nature-Based Solution for Complex Water Scarcity Management.” She emphasized that a comprehensive approach, potentially integrating surface and subsurface methods, is crucial for effectively addressing water scarcity. A particularly promising solution is the nature-based MAR (Managed Aquifer Recharge) method, which leverages knowledge of groundwater flows for subsurface recharge, achieving significant regional results. This innovative method, registered as NaBa-MAR (Nature Based MAR) by ELTE, represents a forward-thinking strategy in combating water scarcity.