Global Change

The Upper Rhine region is particularly affected by the impacts of climate change. Heat waves and droughts, sultriness, tropical nights, but also floods and storms as well as poor air quality have an impact on people and the environment and especially also on small and medium-sized enterprises as well as the involved actors in their daily work. In the transnational research project Clim'Ability Care, several research institutions are working on how to deal with the challenges of climate change. Here it is possible to build on the findings of the previous projects Clim'Ability and Clim'Ability Design. In the new project phase Clim'Ability Care, the focus is on promoting and deriving a new climate-resilient corporate culture. The central question here is how to integrate the dimensions of warning, mitigation, adaptation and care. The specific objectives are to: (1) Selecting sites that are particularly sensitive to climate change due to their climatic and socioeconomic makeup (2) Updating and expanding the toolbox "Clim'Ability", in which climatic stressors and the resulting affectedness, but also adaptation strategies are available online (3) Promotion of a new corporate culture throughout the Upper Rhine region through "learning situations“ (4) Institutionalization through the creation of a new cross-border corporate and risk culture (5) Communication, dissemination and visibility of the project The collaboration between regional universities, public institutions and SMEs promotes synergies between different local, disciplinary and economic cultures. In parallel, the project explores the institutional and economic models and concepts with regard to the sustainability of territorial climate services in the Southern Upper Rhine region.

Gruner S

EU-INTERREG VI

Human influence has long interfered with natural floodplain evolution. While the indirect effects of deforestation on sediment transport and floodplain dynamics have been extensively researched, the socio-ecological processes and feedback mechanisms that determine how fluvial systems evolve along trajectories and path dependencies have only recently entered the scientific debate. We use the concept of a fluvio-social metabolism to illustrate these complex interdependencies between anthropogenic and natural processes that define how natural river systems transitioned into a fluvial anthroposphere. The aim of the project is to decipher the fluvio-social metabolism along path-dependencies and trajectories and to understand system dynamics of the fluvial anthroposphere in the Upper Rhine area. We focus on three specific aspects and their mutual interdependencies: socio-political systems, climate dynamics, and legacy sediments, integrating social and environmental archives as well as detailed laboratory and geostatistical analysis. By combining quantitative, semi-quantitative and qualitative methods we combine social and natural sciences. We seek to determine integrating indicators for the transition from natural floodplains to a fluvial anthroposphere on multiple spatio-temporal scales. Our research analyses the period from medieval times until the onset of the industrial revolution in the region around 1850 with focus on suspected transition periods. We hypothesise that in this fluvio-social system, specific socio-natural and political constellations, including territorial shifts, economical exploitation, institutions, conflicts, climatic variability and extremes, as well as riverine floods, determined path dependencies and trajectories of fluvial landscape evolution that found their expression in the floodplain record as legacy sediments. We follow a multidisciplinary approach that integrates the expertise from different disciplines, combining historic, climatic, and geomorphologic expertise. In three interlinking work packages, we investigate how 1) actors, socio-political constellations and institutions influenced floodplain development, 2) regional climate variability and extreme events impacted socio-ecological processes, and 3) natural and societal dynamics found their expression in the floodplain sedimentary record. Synthesising these various strands of social, climatic and geomorphologic results, we ultimately aim to integrate our insights into deciphering the fluvio-social metabolism. Finally, we evaluate to which degree our results can contribute to model this dynamic fluvio-social metabolism empirically, numerically and multivariate-statistically.

Blöthe J
Phone: 203-9224
Email: jan.bloethe@geographie.uni-freiburg.de

DFG

Under the pressure of global societal challenges, increasing risks in the context of natural hazards pose a significant challenge for many regions in Switzerland, including many smaller mountain communities. Reactions to this challenge include calls for progress in knowledge production and risk communication to ensure a high level of acceptance of risk management measures. The central aim of this project is to expand the understanding of political dimensions of knowledge dynamics in natural hazard risk management and to develop an analytical framework for analysing justice implications. Empirically, the project focuses on a rural community in the Entlebuch region (Canton Lucerne), whose development has been linked to social negotiations on how to deal with natural hazards for a long time (e.g. construction of protective structures against debris flows, establishment of a local avalanche service). Processes and contexts of knowledge production and circulation as well as their interrelations with social processes of spatial production are analysed across scales on the basis of a qualitative field study starting from the local context. Conceptually, the project uses the idea of socio-technical imaginaries (STI) to analyse the links and interactions between normative, epistemic and material dimensions of risk management. Based on intensive analyses of everyday practices and interpretative patterns at a local level, the project relates historical and current spatial visions of desired futures to contestations about the management of natural hazards and related processes of knowledge production and circulation. Based on interviews, informal conversations, observations and document analyses at local, cantonal and national level (e.g. with practitioners, political decision-makers, scientists, residents), the study investigates how past and current visions of desired futures (e.g. concerning the development of rural mountain regions or the significance of technical solutions in socio-environmental relations) materialise in natural hazard risk management and related processes of knowledge production and circulation. In this context, the categorisation of the respective processes in sociotechnical imaginaries across scales is of vital importance.

Rudloff A
Email: anna.rudloff@geographie.uni-freiburg.de

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Suspended sediment load dominates the sediment export from most lowland rivers around the world, also constituting a significant transport medium for pollutants and contaminants. This has important implications for the management of river systems that aims at achieving a good ecological and chemical status, as required for instance by the European Water Frame directive. A thorough understanding of the sources, transport mechanisms and sinks of suspended sediment is therefore a crucial prerequisite for successful management. However, sources and sinks of suspended sediment and the resulting concentration in the river water are highly variable throughout the year and in between years. In this project, we are interested in the spatiotemporal variability of suspended sediment transport in major German lowland rivers. In a first publication, we find that distinct breaks in the scaling relationship between suspended sediment concentration and discharge are induced by the organic matter concentration

Hoffmann Th