There is no quick solution to the water shortage problem in Bulgaria.
This is what Julian Popov, former Minister of Environment and Water, told BNR, specifying that there are solutions that can quickly improve the situation to a small extent.
"The water sector in the country has been abandoned for decades, and it is not only a lack of drinking water in individual settlements, but a much deeper problem - it is also related to climate change, to the way in which develops our agriculture, by which we manage our rivers, the dams, which we don't even know how many there are", he explained.
The first thing to do is to recognize the problem of aridity in its depth, Popov pointed out and added:
"Research into all dimensions of the water crisis is needed. Quite serious administrative and legal changes are needed to change the way water is generally managed in Bulgaria.
The best sense of change for people is the water network - to be managed much, much better, and when invested in it, not to reduce losses by 5% or 10% after tens of millions invested, and losses to be reduced gradually to 10%. In Bulgaria, there are settlements with water supply systems that lose over 90% of their water. No matter how much water there is in the dams, it is very likely that there will be a regime, because this water disappears along the way," Popov pointed out.
If the waters of the Danube River are included, Bulgaria becomes rich in water resources, but if the Danube is excluded, then it is not rich, explained the former Minister of Environment and Water. He emphasized that the destruction of the irrigation system, which was very well developed in the past, is also a problem.
"We are not using the waters of the Danube and we are not irrigating the Danube Plain well enough, this has a chain effect. And whether you are rich or not depends on how much you spend, and we spend in the most outrageous way, so no matter how rich we are, in the end we turn out to be poor," Popov explained.