Report on the „EUSDR PA 10 – Hungarian National Hearing 2021” event

This year’s National Hearing, concerning Danube Region Strategy’s Priority Area 10, took place on 31 August, 2021 in the building of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade in Budapest, where our association was also present. The event focused on the digitisation of agriculture and public services, closely connected to the programme of this year’s Slovak presidency of the EUSDR, which has two thematic pillars: digitisation and the connection between climate change and biodiversity.

Dr. Viktor György Oroszi, the National Coordinator of the EUSDR, opened the hearing, then Balázs Heincz (Head of Department for Water Diplomacy and the Danube Region Strategy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade) and Attila Balla (Deputy Executive Director of Business Development at Digital Success Nonprofit Ltd.) welcomed the participants. Afterwards, the digitisation of agriculture and digital public services were presented in two sessions, structured around these two main themes. The first session of the conference focused on the increasingly challenging issue of drought damages. In connection with this issue, Zita Bihari (Head of Climate Department at the Hungarian Meteorological Services), presented the DriDanube Project, which supports drought monitoring and the uniform assessment of impacts and risks in the Danube Region. Károly Fiala from the Lower Tisza Water Management Directorate (Alsó-Tisza-vidéki Vízügyi Igazgatóság) spoke about the development and operation of the Operational Drought and Water Scarcity Management System, which is unique in Europe in providing freely available data to support decision-making related to drought damage prevention. The second session focused on the digitisation of public services. Dr. Mátyás Gáspár (University of Public Service, Good local governance research workshop, research coordinator, honorary associate professor) pointed out that though digitisation can be a new form of exclusion, digitisation-based solutions such as video-based telepresence solutions can also be important tools for ensuring access to (public) services.

The detailed agenda can be found here, the presentations can be downloaded from here.