A Christmas Eve Tale of Water

Christmas Eve evening is conducive to taking stock. When the official hustle and bustle quiets down for a while, emails stop demanding immediate answers, and the country enters Christmas pause mode, it becomes easier to see what fades into the background on a daily basis. In an old story that most of us associate with school readings, a man was taught an unusual lesson by fate – he was visited in turn by three emissaries: past, present and future. When we try to look at the year 2025 from the perspective of water in this way, it turns out that there is something to show here as well.

In the pages of Water Matters, we have returned this year to floods, to beavers and to the drought, which has ceased to be a report abstraction and is increasingly permeating everyday conversations. However, if we set aside the individual articles and look at this year as a single story, three recurring themes emerge – three sins against water that will persistently return until they are worked through.

So let’s imagine that three water spirits come to us on Christmas Eve night. Not to moralize, but to call a spade a spade.

The Ghost of a Certain Clerical Schizophrenia

The first one has nothing spectacular about it. It comes in the company of zoning maps, fragments of administrative decisions, records from permit registers. This is the spirit of contradictory decisions – that special variety of chaos, in which each letter individually happens to be correct, but together they form a system that is completely irresistible to contact with hydrology.

We have seen this repeatedly in 2025. Permits for floodplain development, argued on the grounds that nothing has flooded here for thirty years. Investments in protected areas, pushed through under the slogan of local development. Persistent disregard for the fact that the river valley is not an empty space waiting to be developed, but part of the system.

Then comes the intense rainfall. Water returns to the places to which it has every right – to flood terraces and lowlands that have always been exposed to surges, to old depressions. The developments that have appeared there thanks to successive decisions by officials are beginning to experience the effects of the phenomena warned against in expert opinions. This is followed by requests for: urgent decongestion of the watercourse, deepening of the channel, flood protection.

Then the conservation administration, not infrequently the same one that previously approved the investment in a naturally valuable area, refuses to interfere with the watercourse, citing the need to protect habitats and species. The administration in charge of water management hears from residents that they are supposed to do the order, although their room for maneuver has been significantly limited by previous decisions of other authorities.

It is this spirit – the spirit of inconsistency – that asks the most difficult question: how many more times will we be surprised by the fact that water moves according to the laws of physics and the topography of the land, rather than the content written on paper?

Spirit of the Stigmatized Beaver

The second ghost has a character that evokes extremely different emotions in the Polish public debate. This is the ghost of beavers – animals that in strategic documents play the role of an ally, while in interventionist writings they are often cast in the role of an adversary.

On the slides of presentations from nature conferences, beavers are almost heroes of the collective imagination: they increase retention, slow down runoff, help mitigate storm surges, and support biodiversity. It’s hard to find a better example of nature working in landscape retention.

In the field, the picture is more complex. Where preying causes the water table to rise and periodically flood a road, a meadow or a section of a field, enthusiasm for natural solutions disappears. There are requests for: dam removal, population reduction, restoration. The correspondence we receive makes it clear: beavers are welcome as long as their activities remain invisible from the backyard.

The article about beavers that we published earlier this year was a story about how difficult it is to reconcile the language of conservation with the practice of land management. The problem is not that beavers cross our plans. It lies in the fact that many plans don’t assume their presence at all – just as they don’t take into account the need to leave space for water.

The second spirit does not accuse directly. It only reminds us that we cannot expect nature to do some of the retention work for us and at the same time demand that it do so only where it does not come into contact with any local interest.

The Spirit of the Omniscient Influencer

The third ghost is the most contemporary. It takes the form of snippets of social media discussions, short comments under articles, simplifications that have been circulating for years. This is the spirit of comfortable half-knowledge, which relieves the effort to find out how things really are.

In 2025. This has been particularly evident in discussions of drought. On the one hand, we have a growing number of studies, models indicating changes in groundwater and surface water recharge. On the other – persistently repeated narratives about land reclamation that drained Poland, as if time had stopped at the stage of the exclusively drainage function of these systems.

Meanwhile, agricultural areas, but also wetlands, are today one of the key areas where the water retention capacity of the landscape can – and must – be rebuilt. However, this requires more than a slogan. It is necessary to understand that existing facilities can be rebuilt to serve retention, not just to quickly drain excess water. That drainage and irrigation can become elements of a single, consciously managed system, rather than two parallel ones.

The spirit of half-knowledge does not use data. It operates with a mental shorthand that sounds good and allows one to feel competent without having to refer to scientific literature or planning documents. In this way, drought is sometimes shallowed into the role of just another seasonal topic, instead of becoming the impetus for a serious conversation about how we design landscapes and how we want to manage water at the catchment scale.

The third spirit raises a question that applies not only to the administration, but also to us – authors, readers, commentators – are we content with what circulates on the web, or are we ready for the effort required to confront reliable knowledge?

Epilogue: what water teaches after 2025

When the three ghosts leave, there is no dramatic climax. What is left instead is a picture of a year that, in the context of water, turns out to be remarkably coherent – though not in the sense we would like to think of it.

We see an administration that still struggles to translate declarations of sustainable water management into a consistent sequence of spatial decisions. We see beavers, written into strategies as allies, but usually treated as an obstacle to maintaining holy peace. We see drought, which requires precise language, good data and long-term thinking, and is too often covered up with simplifications.

The Christmas Eve water story does not demand sentimentality. It demands reliability. Reliability in planning, in risk assessment, in talking to residents, in the way we use information. Water is neither our adversary nor our ally – it is an element of reality that cannot be negotiated with. It can only be taken into account or ignored and suffer the consequences.

If one were to look for any Christmas moral from 2025, it would be a simple one: before the next time a decision is made that affects a space, a watercourse, a valley, a farmland, it is worth stepping outside one’s own piece of the puzzle for a moment and seeing the whole. From the perspective of a catchment area, not just a plot of land. From the perspective of a process, not a single event. From the perspective of many years, not just one season.

The ghosts are gone, the water remains. And it will be a consistent reminder of our negligence – not in metaphor, but in the level of the water table, the frequency of droughts and the scale of losses. It’s up to us to ignore this lesson in the years to come, or to finally treat it as a starting point and not just an uncomfortable year-end summary.