Environment, public utilities

There was a decrease in the stocks of major big game species in Hungary (red deer, fallow deer, roe deer, mouflon and wild boar) by the spring of 2021 compared to a year earlier. The largest fall (of 22%) was recorded for the wild boar stock, mostly as an impact of the African swine fever and the larger bag aimed to prevent the illness from further spreading. Out of small game species, the number of hares and pheasants rose in the last three years.

In Hungary, the monthly average electricity consumption per household was 189 kilowatt-hours in 2020, the highest in the last 20 years. Pest County’s 240 kWh figure was significantly higher than the national average. On average, a household consumer used 91 m3 of piped gas per month, more than in most years of the 2010s.

One-fifth of our country’s territory (2 million 60 thousand hectares) was forest management area at the end of 2020. In Hungary 56% of the forest management area was state owned, 43% private ownership, further 1.0% was community owned. There was no significant change in the owneship structure of forests in the last decade.

There have been merely five years since 2000 when there has not been a drought in Hungary. At the same time, the proportion of areas exposed to drought reached 80% in six years during these two decades. 2017–2019 were years particularly hit by lack of precipitation. Drought reigned in the spring of 2020, too, yet the more-than-average precipitation in the summer months later on made up for the lack of water for the most part. Drought was seen on 310 thousand hectares in total in 2020, so the proportion of areas exposed to drought was 3.3%.

In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro, and gave the impetus to the integration of the concept of sustainable development into national and global policies. In Hungary, the National Sustainable Development Council (NFFT, established in 2007) developed the Hungarian National Sustainable Development Framework Strategy, which was adopted by the Parliament in 2013. The framework strategy aims to provide a nationwide, long-term guide for individual and community action. Compared to the strategy of the European Union or the UN SDGs, the Hungarian framework strategy interprets the concept of sustainability much more narrowly. In this interpretation, sustainable development policy is primarily a long-term resource management activity in which it distinguishes four resources: human, social, natural and economic resources.