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In eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, historic policies led to large, monocropped agricultural landscapes resulting in degradation of traditional landscapes. In the last 20 years, the expansion of urban and industrial areas has added to this degradation. The growing interest in nature‐based solutions, including water‐retention measures, is a response to reversing landscape degradation, rejuvenating ecosystem services, and mitigating the impacts of large‐scale commercial agriculture and climate change. In this study, the costs and benefits of water‐retention measures in eastern Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are assessed. Results indicate that water‐retention measures offer increased water availability over all land use classes assessed, help increase crop productivity, and aid in landscape cooling. Croplands are suggested as being the best value for money, offering the greatest volume potentials (mean = 88 million m3), cooling effects (mean = −1.6°C), and productivity gains (mean = €66 million yr−1), while also being the cheapest to implement per unit area. Differing policies in the three states will likely result in non‐uniform selection or implementation of measures. Future work should focus on local‐level studies offering greater practical messages beyond the regional‐level analysis conducted here. This work contributes to the growing body of literature assessing the costs and benefits of water‐retention measures, including the potential for landscape cooling, lowering temperature gradients, and ecosystem restoration. As the world urbanises, and as more land is converted to homogeneous cropland, such measures may prove critical in mitigating climate change, landscape drying, flood runoff, and soil and nutrient loss.

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In 1993, the Slovak Government planned to create an additional water supply resource in the form of a substantial reservoir. In response to this situation, the NGO 'People and Water' proposed an alternative to the aforementioned project in 1994. This alternative proposal comprised a comprehensive watershed restoration of water resources in degraded and desiccated ecosystems, while respecting the rights of inhabitants in historical villages to a quality and sustainable life. This initiative was called The Blue Alternative and entailed the restoration of water resources in the 100 square kilometres of the Torysa river watershed. People and Water's volunteers were able to implement a small pilot project of the Blue Alternative in a catchment-area of the Torysa watershed by 1996. People and Water's volunteers built small slope depressions, water-retention swales, and small wooden weirs in order to reduce the speed of the run-off of precipitation from the steep slopes, which facilitated the waters' absorption into underground, saturated soil structures (i.e. facilitating increased aquifer recharge). Since spring 1998, this formerly dry, small watershed has been transformed into a steady, persistent water source via small stream output.The Blue Alternative's pilot project also demonstrated an alternative strategy in the sustainable management of water resources and proposed solutions to several management questions (e.g. How to address the lack of water resources?; How to achieve the maximum efficiency and effectiveness in the management of this strategic natural resource?; etc.). The preliminary analysis has showed that this type of ecological watershed restoration approach does address the various water management, social, economic and environmental challenges the region faces, while realizing, at least, 10-times greater cost effectiveness than the technocratic government proposal. This inexpensive pilot project currently encourages groups and communities to address the growing water-management problems in Slovakia (e.g. the lack of water resources, flood-prevention challenges, biodiversity conservation, natural services capital restoration, the lack of approaches to moderating negative impacts stemming from climatic changes, etc.). The Blue Alternative pilot project and interdisciplinary observation of anthropocentric impacts on hydrological systems in Slovakia have produced some important conclusions. These conclusions concern human influences on the desiccation of watersheds and, as a result, are affecting climatic change, which is not only manifest at the local and regional levels but also on global levels. THE SOCIO-POLITICAL CHARACTER OF WATER MANAGEMENT PARADIGM IN SLOVAKIACurrently, the problems of water supply management in Slovakia are being addressed by means of outmoded technocratic engineering methods, which are based on historical and 51 Brought to you by | University of Toronto-Ocul Authenticated Download Date | 7/20/15 5:53 PM