Brandenburg's water crisis: Industrial thirst vs. public need around Berlin

Petra Liesenfeld watches her garden struggle. The groundwater beneath her hometown of Baruth, a small town sixty kilometers south of Berlin, keeps dropping year after year. Trees that once thrived now wither. She waters more often than she ever did, and still it's not enough. Around her, the landscape is drying out. Yet at the same time, two major beverage companies are planning to expand their operations in the very heart of this water protection area.

Baruth has bottled mineral water since the 1990s. The facility is now operated by Red Bull and the Austrian producer Rauch, and they want to build a new canning factory and additional infrastructure. The numbers tell a stark story: the town's waterworks hold a license to extract a fixed amount of groundwater annually. Of that total, only 8 percent goes to the roughly 4,300 people who live in Baruth. The remaining 92 percent—enough water to supply a city of 57,000—flows to Red Bull and Rauch. The companies extract up to 7 million liters daily, but the public has no idea exactly how much they actually use.

Peter Ilk, the town's former mayor and a champion of industrial development in the region, sees nothing wrong with this arrangement. The contracts are legal, he says. They guarantee that residents come first. "That's how you end up with this ratio of around one to 10 in terms of consumption," he explained, suggesting the disparity is simply the natural result of industrial need. But there is a problem hiding in plain sight: those contracts are about thirty years old, written when the water situation looked very different.

Irina Engelhardt, a hydrogeologist at Berlin's Technical University, has studied the data carefully. Since those contracts were signed, groundwater levels have fallen significantly. Groundwater recharge rates have changed. Land use has shifted. The authorities, she argues, are overestimating how much water is actually available. "I am concerned at how the water situation is developing in the state of Brandenburg," she said. She and a citizens' initiative are demanding new, independent assessments and genuine transparency. When they requested access to groundwater monitoring documents, large sections came back redacted. Liesenfeld asks the obvious question: "Why isn't the public allowed to know?"

Andreas Marx, a drought researcher who heads the Drought Monitor at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, calls the secrecy troubling. Water is a public resource by law—it cannot be privately owned. Every contract, every decision about its use, should be open to scrutiny. "By law, water is a public commodity," he said. "So, in my view, every decision made and every contract signed over its use should be open to the public." Yet the price Red Bull and Rauch pay for their daily extraction remains hidden from view. Both companies declined to comment when asked about their operations.

Brandenburg is still, by global standards, a water-rich region. The challenge is not permanent scarcity but learning to manage dry periods that can stretch across two or three years. Yet the water balance is shifting. Since the severe drought of 2018, groundwater has not recovered adequately in many places. Higher temperatures and increased evaporation make it harder for deeper soil reserves to replenish. Ninety-five percent of Brandenburg's drinking water comes from groundwater, which makes this trend deeply consequential.

The pressure is mounting from multiple directions. In Grünheide, east of Berlin, Tesla's Gigafactory holds a permit to extract 1.4 million cubic meters of water annually and is planning to expand production to 7,500 vehicles per week. Meanwhile, residents have been repeatedly asked to conserve. Manu Hoyer, a local resident, noted that schools and kindergartens have been delayed because there simply wasn't enough water. Marx observes that when scarcity hits, residents are always the first to face restrictions—they're the easiest to limit. Industrial companies rarely are, because the economic consequences are harder to measure and justify.

Further south, in Spremberg, a massive copper mine is planned. Over coming decades, copper—essential for power grids, electric vehicles, and the energy transition—will be extracted from depths up to 1,200 meters. The water that emerges from such depths is highly saline and sulfurous, requiring extensive treatment. Geotechnical engineer Michael Pfeifer warns that the proposed treatment plant is nowhere near capable of cleaning this water to a standard safe for discharge into the Spree River, which flows north toward Berlin. The river already carries the legacy of decades of lignite mining. When lignite extraction ends in 2038, the groundwater currently pumped from those mines into the Spree will stop flowing. During dry summers, the river could carry 75 percent less water, with consequences rippling all the way to Berlin's water supply.

One possible solution exists: artificial groundwater recharge, where excess water from rainy periods is stored underground for later use. Engelhardt is researching where this could work in Brandenburg. In some areas, including where Tesla operates, such recharge could theoretically meet nearly all local drinking water demand. But the solution requires something Brandenburg may not have: enough available water to store. Marx poses the question that will define the region's future: What rules should govern how water is distributed among residents, agriculture, nature, and industry when dry periods stretch long? As global temperatures continue rising, it is not a question Brandenburg alone must answer.