Press releases
Prof. Dr. Dietrich Borchardt (UFZ, speaker of the water initiative) and Prof. Dr. Magdalena Scheck-Wenderoth (GFZ, Solution Lab SOLVE) during KLIMAlunch in Berlin.
[Translate to English:] KLIMALunch in Berlin
At the KLIMA Lunch hosted by the Helmholtz KLIMA Dialogue Platform on 15 September 2026, 23 staff members and advisors from the German Bundestag and federal ministries met with experts from the Helmholtz Water Initiative to discuss water security.
The discussion focused on the question of which solutions Germany needs to secure its water supply in the long term and strengthen resilience to the impacts of climate change. Currently low water levels in rivers and lakes, as well as low groundwater levels in many regions, highlight the urgency of these challenges.
Prof. Dr. Magdalena Scheck-Wenderoth from GFZ and Prof. Dr. Dietrich Borchardt from UFZ provided an overview of the Helmholtz Water Initiative and insights into its three Solution Labs. They particularly highlighted the importance of bringing together perspectives and expertise from different disciplines and institutions. After all, groundwater, the subsurface, soils, ecosystems and human activities are closely interconnected.
Our goal is to bring together scientific knowledge and practical needs with partners from policymaking and practice and translate them into concrete solutions for greater water security.
ERC Starting Grant for Larisa Tarasova
Dr. Larisa Tarasova, a scientist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ and a protagonist of the Helmholtz Water Initiative featured at Helmholtz Future Forward in Berlin, was awarded the highly competitive ERC Starting Grant on 3 September 2026. The grant is endowed with approximately €1.5 million and will enable her to pursue and expand her research over the next five years.
In her ERC project “earth.zip”, Larisa Tarasova will investigate how different landscape structures at different spatial scales influence the way water is stored and transported and ultimately reaches rivers. To this end, she is developing a new method that uses mathematical wavelets to analyse satellite and drone imagery, making both large-scale landscape features and the smallest structures accessible for hydrological models and AI. By combining these data with thermal infrared and isotope measurements, she aims to gain a better understanding of how landscapes and the subsurface interact – and thus improve our ability to predict more reliably where and when floods and droughts will occur in the future.
Larisa Tarasova is one of 113 scientists across Europe who were successful in the Life Sciences category, with her proposal selected from 1,261 applications. We warmly congratulate her on this outstanding achievement.