Small boats rest idle on cracked mud where a side channel of the Danube once flowed freely near Novi Sad in northern Serbia. Juvenile fish circle in the last two shrinking ponds. Water temperatures have climbed above 30 degrees Celsius. “This is all we have,” fisherman Dusan Jovanovic told reporters. “If they start to die, they will all die at once.”
The scene repeats across Central and Eastern Europe this summer. Persistent drought and record heat have hammered rivers, lakes, and fish farms from Slovenia to Hungary. Losses run into millions of euros. They compound damage to crops, river shipping, and power generation. Scientists link the conditions to human-caused climate change that has made such extremes far more probable.
Fortune reported on the unfolding crisis in late August, highlighting desertification risks on the Great Hungarian Plain. Nearly the entire country sits under severe or extreme drought. Some 99 percent of its land, according to the national meteorological service. Of Hungary’s 27,000 hectares of fish ponds, 1,588 hectares dried completely. Nearly 280 metric tons of fish died at 20 farms. The Agriculture and Food Economy Ministry put the revenue loss at 1.3 billion forints, or about $4.2 million. Producers warned that restocking could take years. Operators sometimes drained one pond to save fish in another.
Romania’s fish farmers face a longer shadow. Catalin Platon, president of the ROMFISH National Association of Fish Producers, explained that carp production cycles last three or four years. Losses from the 2023 and 2024 droughts still ripple through every season. Water policies that favored crop irrigation left ponds empty. “So what we lost in 2023 has impact every year since,” he said.
In the Czech Republic farmers cut feeding to lower oxygen demand. They aerated ponds or drained marginal ones early. Jan Sokolik, technician at the Rybarstvi Trebon fishery, said big ponds remain the next challenge. The Czech Fishing Association called for sustained rain to relieve immediate pressure but stressed the need for landscape measures to hold water longer. Similar adaptations appear in Bosnia. Trout farmer Veljko Budjen near Trebinje reduced production and feeding. Trout need cold, oxygenated water. “So during the summer you are forced to reduce trout production and feeding so the business can just barely survive,” he said. Some add liquid oxygen. Others simply wait for rain.
Slovenian firefighters pumped 8 million liters of water into Lake Pristava in the east. Water chestnut overgrowth and low oxygen threatened mass fish kills. Danijel Fras of the Pesnica Lenart Fishing Association expressed surprise that any fish remained alive. The pattern matches reports from France, where volunteers net trout and young salmon from drying rivers and move them downstream to oxygenated stretches. Mathieu Le Bouter described the stress on fish when high temperatures combine with low dissolved oxygen. The Loire has fallen to historic lows. A quarter of smaller waterways stand stagnant or vanished.
Satellite images reveal the scale. The BBC examined Copernicus and Sentinel-2 data showing the Danube at its lowest levels in 30 years in several countries. Exposed shipwrecks from World War II dot the riverbed in Serbia. Mammoth bones surfaced in Bulgaria. Nuclear plants along the Danube curtailed output because cooling water ran too warm or too scarce. The Rhine stranded barges and canceled cruises. Vegetation indices fell below five-year averages across 70 percent of France, half the UK, and 40 percent of western Germany. Prof. Andrew Challinor of the University of Leeds called the images consistent with widespread water stress. “It does not bode well” for crops that cover much of the continent. Prof. Luis Samaniego of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research noted soil moisture in the worst spots sat lower than on 98 percent of comparable historical dates. Even rain later might arrive too late for this year’s harvest.
The numbers from attribution science paint a clear picture. A World Weather Attribution study released in July found that climate change made the observed soil moisture deficits roughly five times more likely in western Europe and 11 times more likely in the east. High evaporative demand driven by extreme heat turned a dry period into an exceptional one. In western Europe the combination of low rainfall and soaring potential evapotranspiration became 80 times more probable. In the east the figure reached 40 times. Dr. Mariam Zachariah of Imperial College London, part of the research team, warned that at 1.4 degrees Celsius of warming these conditions already strike repeatedly. Push temperatures to 2.8 degrees and the likelihood could double again. Without swift emissions cuts, Europe faces a future of recurring scorching, dry summers.
Agricultural losses already mount. France stands on track for its lowest maize harvest in 50 years. Romania lost more than one million hectares of maize. Wildfires burned 116,000 hectares in Spain and 42,000 in France by mid-summer. River traffic slowed on the Rhine and Danube, disrupting supply chains. Nuclear reactors idled. Energy prices climbed. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission warned in late August that persistent heat and water deficits had sharply cut yield forecasts for summer crops across western and central Europe, with some regions facing outright failure. Grasslands and pastures declined, raising fodder shortages for livestock.
But the 2026 event did not appear from nowhere. Earlier research traced European summer drying trends back decades. A study in Nature Geoscience found that changes in atmospheric circulation since the 1980s explain about 55 percent of the observed decline in summer soil moisture across mid-latitude Europe. Anticyclonic patterns that bring warm, dry air have grown more frequent. These circulation shifts amplify the drying effect of higher temperatures. The same patterns help explain why droughts now arrive earlier and hit harder. A June analysis from researchers at Humboldt University in Berlin linked winter phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation to the following summer’s dryness, offering potential lead time for preparation that many farmers and water managers have yet to exploit fully.
Recent coverage adds texture to the human cost. The Associated Press, whose reporting formed the basis for the Fortune article, quoted officials across the region describing emergency responses that feel increasingly routine. In Hungary the ministry noted that some farms diverted water between ponds in a desperate shell game. Czech technicians admitted they had only begun planning for the largest ponds. Serbian fishermen shook their heads at temperatures no one could recall. The pattern echoes events in 2018, 2022, and 2023, yet each year the baseline seems to shift.
Soil moisture data from the European Drought Observatory and the Combined Drought Indicator showed alert conditions spreading from eastern Europe into France, southern Germany, northern Italy, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and western Romania by mid-July. The Joint Research Centre forecast that dry conditions would persist into September across much of the north and center while the Mediterranean might see some relief. Another heatwave loomed. Low river flows threatened aquatic life beyond commercial species. In Switzerland hundreds of thousands of fish and invertebrates perished. Irish rivers saw lethal combinations of heat, low water, and pollution kill trout, salmon, and other species. Algal blooms flourished in warmer, slower waters, further reducing oxygen.
Economists and policy makers have started to tally the bill. Earlier heat, drought, and flood events in the EU cost at least €43 billion in a single recent year, with projections climbing toward €126 billion by the end of the decade. River transport, hydropower, cooling for thermal and nuclear plants, and irrigated agriculture all sit in the crosshairs. Low-income households feel the pinch first through higher food and energy prices. Yet adaptation lags. Emergency bills in France to speed construction of water storage for farms sparked debate over equitable allocation between agriculture, ecosystems, and households. Long-term landscape restoration, better water retention, and reduced emissions remain aspirational in many basins.
The Danube offers a stark case study. The Guardian traveled stretches of the river and found the “Rock of Starvation,” a historic low-water marker, fully exposed for the first time in memory. Budapest recorded temperatures near 42 degrees Celsius. Islands of dry riverbed cracked underfoot like clay tiles. Nuclear reactors along its banks shut down for the first time in 44 years. Farmers watched irrigation canals run dry. Drinking water supplies came under pressure in some villages. The river sustains ten countries. Its distress ripples outward.
And the trend points upward. Models suggest that dry soils themselves amplify late-summer heat waves by shifting more solar energy into warming the air rather than evaporating moisture. One recent study found that when soils enter summer already dry, the hottest spells last 15 percent longer and the risk of a once-in-a-century extreme summer rises fourfold. The feedback loop tightens with every degree of warming.
Volunteers scooping fish from puddles in Brittany or Serbia capture the immediate tragedy. Scientists calculating attribution multipliers reveal the deeper cause. Policy makers debating storage reservoirs or emissions targets will decide how many more such summers Europe must endure. The fish circling in those two Serbian ponds do not have the luxury of waiting for consensus. Neither, really, does the rest of the continent.