Environment, public utilities

One-fifth (1,948 thousand hectares) of Hungary's area was covered by forest area at the end of 2021. Some six-tenths – nearly 1.2 million hectares – of the forests are used for economic purposes, their proportion showing a slowly decreasing trend. The extent of those serving protective purposes was up from 689 thousand hectares in 2010 to 769 thousand hectares, and their share to 39%, while the area of public welfare forests (thermal forests, park forests, educational forests, experimental forests and wildlife parks) lessened from 21 thousand to 20 thousand hectares (their proportion to 1.0%) in the meantime.

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.