Emerging hotspots of groundwater conflicts during droughts in Germany

Groundwater conflicts are increasing worldwide, particularly during droughts. While conflict dynamics have been widely studied in historically water-scarce regions, emerging hotspots in Europe remain understudied. We introduce a text-mining approach to monitor conflicts over time and apply it to Germany, where droughts have exacerbated tensions among water users. Using a corpus of over 12,000 news articles published between 2000 and 2022, we map the spatiotemporal distribution of reported conflicts and identify their drivers using a metric of reported conflict intensity combining frequency and prominence of conflict reporting. Groundwater conflicts are geographically widespread, with recurring hotspots and new conflict areas emerging during the 2018–2022 multi-year drought. While water pollution and environmental protection have diminished in importance, scarcity, agriculture, and drought have become key drivers. Reported conflicts show only moderate spatial correlations with groundwater withdrawal, recharge, and pollution, suggesting media dynamics and social context shape which conflicts become publicly visible.