Position paper of the German Water Research Alliance

Water security for people and nature is a cornerstone of sustainable politics. The Water Science Alliance, in which the German water research community has come together across disciplines, therefore welcomes the Federal Environment Ministry's recently presented National Water Strategy, in particular its principles of integration, precaution and orientation towards the natural water balance. The implementation of the strategy requires innovative concepts based on scientific knowledge. The key to success is an open, systematic dialogue with the participation of all relevant user groups, public administration, politics and science.

The pressure on water resources and bodies of water is increasing continuously - in Germany as well as worldwide. Water is becoming scarce for people and ecosystems and gets out of control when there is high rainfall. The pollution of groundwater and surface water by pollutants and foreign substances is becoming increasingly complex. The consequences are increasingly complex water treatment and supply, increased damage to infrastructures and degraded waters with limited ecological functionality.

The National Water Strategy, which was developed in a long process with citizen and expert participation and presented on June 8, 2021, addresses these challenges. It reflects the realization, which has not only matured in federal politics, that in addition to a clever climate and biodiversity policy, a holistic water strategy is indispensable as a supporting pillar of sustainable development in the 21st century.

The German Water Research Alliance (WSA) welcomes the cornerstones of the National Water Strategy and the associated initiative of federal politics to tackle water and water management strategically. The ESC's recommendation for politics and administration is therefore to design and implement the National Water Strategy in the coming legislative period with courage and foresight. Integration, orientation towards the natural water balance and precaution as core points of the strategy are elementary for a successful water policy of the future. The management of water resources and bodies of water must therefore be organized as a cross-sectional task and a consistently integrative perspective must be adopted. This requires new conceptual approaches and cooperation - embedded in a solid knowledge and data base about natural and technical water systems and their interdependencies.

The goals formulated by politicians are, in their entirety, welcome and ambitious. The overriding goal is to guarantee water security for human use and the aquatic ecosystems alike. The vision must be a zero-deficit target: i.e. interventions in water systems are only justifiable if ecosystem functions are maintained or improved. This principle requires radically new approaches and priorities for water and water management, not only from a technical point of view, but also in order to minimize and solve conflicting goals. Politics and public administration have to adapt to these challenges.

The main idea is a system perspective that does justice to the multisectoral function of water:

• The management of water resources and bodies of water must follow criteria that are oriented towards human wellbeing, the preservation of biodiversity and the guarantee of functioning ecosystems.
• Water volume management, water and water quality require a consistently integrative consideration.
• Tools for water planning require a coherent and integrative view of water systems beyond today's consideration of individual parts of the water cycle, infrastructures and bodies of water.
• In view of the rapidly advancing climate change, short-term and long-term forecasts must be significantly improved with high regional and seasonal differentiations at the same time.

The necessity to develop new concepts and quantitative tools for water management is derived from these requirements. They are associated with high demands on the quality and quantity of the data to be collected as well as on the models used and their conceptual and data compatibility. Both modern methods of data science and - as in climate research - powerful model ensembles for the development of forecasts and scenarios with quantitative information on the model uncertainty must be developed. The usability of these tools must also be guaranteed over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

The WSA also sees the establishment of real-world laboratories as a central tool for developing knowledge that is directly applicable in practice. They allow the totality of the influencing factors and interactions in water bodies and their catchment areas to be assessed. That includes human activities. In addition, real laboratories combine knowledge about water systems from all relevant areas with specific planning approaches. Real laboratories are data-supported and can be mapped virtually in model systems as 'digital twins' of real catchment areas with all important sub-components. Building on this, complex scenarios, decision-making spaces and dialog processes can be developed and presented.

Despite great progress, modern integrated water management still has many conceptual knowledge and data gaps that hinder the successful implementation of the National Water Strategy. These gaps can be closed by a long-term water research and development program that supports the step-by-step implementation of the strategy. Such an action program would have to be formulated from a system perspective, organized across disciplines and coordinated between the water research community represented by the scientific associations, public administration and politics.

For this reason, the German Water Research Alliance considers a 'Research Support Program National Water Strategy' to be urgently needed. Current national and regional research programs provide important elements for this. But they fall short on their own. The reason is that they do not adequately reflect the importance of the quantitative mapping of the central processes from an overall system perspective, recognized in the National Water Strategy. Promising approaches to similarly ambitious national initiatives to strengthen research beyond subject boundaries, departmental responsibilities and federal-state boundaries already exist in other areas of high urgency.

With its innovation potential and bundled knowledge, water research in Germany is ideally equipped to support partners in authorities and politics in order to meet the major challenges in water management. This applies equally to university, non-university and departmental research. Together they have to mobilize the best minds in order to incorporate the current state of knowledge and the latest conceptual and methodological developments into a holistic understanding of the system. In Germany, profound process knowledge and an extensive range of methods are available for this, ranging from molecular analysis of water constituents to real-time monitoring of hydrological, chemical and ecological system parameters on a catchment area scale.

Related Links:

German water research alliance Water Science Alliance e.V. (WSA):
 https://watersciencealliance.org

Strategy Framework Paper of the Water Science Alliance, published June 14, 2021: https://zenodo.org/record/4923068

Draft of the National Water Strategy of the Federal Environment Ministry, presented on June 8, 2021: https://www.bmu.de/fileadmin/Daten_BMU/Download_PDF/Binnengewaesser/langfassung_wasserstrategie_bf.pdf

The Water Science Alliance (WSA) - the German Water Research Alliance - was founded in 2013 as a non-profit association and has its office at the TU Dresden. The chairman is Prof. Peter Krebs, holder of the professorship for urban water management at TUD. The water research alliance has set itself the goal of merging Germany's water research, which is active in more than ten specialist disciplines and is structured in small sections, of identifying and promoting interdisciplinary research topics, and of developing integration potential. On the occasion of this year's conference of the water research alliance on June 15 and 16, 2021, the WSA's strategy framework paper "Water systems in transition - challenges and research needs for German water research", as well as this position paper were presented and adopted.

Contact person at TU Dresden

Prof. Peter Krebs
Tel .: +49 351 463-35257