A quiet alarm is rising along the Tisza, Europe’s notorious river that feeds the Danube basin. Climate change is intensifying both floods and droughts across five countries, threatening communities from Szeged to Bečej. In a bold move, Hungary and Serbia are pooling data and expertise to confront this escalating risk through a joint digital response. Our goal is to develop an integrated water management platform, a cross border digital space where experts, institutions and decision makers exchange data, forecast risks and coordinate real time responses.
The initiative centers on the European interregional project ADAPTisa, which unites universities, public water management companies and authorities from both sides of the border. This collaboration aims to create an integrated management platform for the Tisza river, publicly accessible via the Lower Tisza Regional Water Management Directorate in Szeged, Hungary. The platform will combine historical hydrological data, real time measurements and hydraulic model simulations, with artificial intelligence to forecast floods and droughts.
Budget and backing matter. The ADAPTisa effort totals €1.4 million, with about 85% funded by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy and the remainder provided by project partners in Serbia and Hungary. This financial backbone underpins sensors, portable labs and data transmission that feed the shared system.
On the ground and in the water. In Bečej, Serbia, more than sixty volunteers from teachers to university students gathered on 16 October to collect rubbish along a twelve-kilometre stretch of the river and its banks. Project coordinator Maja Petrović explains that waste from upstream sources—from Ukraine to Hungary—complicates shorelines and downstream flood responses. Every kilo of collected debris and each water sample taken by a mobile lab helps refine the predictive model, as Petrović notes: “every sample we take today, every analysis we do, each kilo of waste we collect will actually be implemented in our water management platform”.
Learning from memory and preparing for worst cases. The initiative also leans on memory of past floods. Miljan Jovanović, a resident of the Vojvodina region, recalls the 2006 inundation when the Tisza rose dramatically, destroying homes before volunteers rebuilt stronger barriers. Péter Kozák, head of the Lower Tisza Regional Water Management Directorate, emphasizes that today’s analyses aim to uncover the background of changing river behavior so that the cheapest and fastest solutions—whether restoration of surface water or new retention areas—can be identified and deployed.
Public access and future resilience. The platform’s public accessibility through ATIVIZIG reflects a commitment to transparency and broad usage among regional water managers. By linking real-time data with historical trends, the project seeks to translate science into practical safeguards for communities along the Tisza and, by extension, the broader Danube corridor that could influence neighboring Romania and other basin nations as climate pressures mount.
