Solution Lab Rur Erft

Knowledge transfer to manage extreme water events

News

22 May 2026

Stakeholder Kick-off

We are excited that the co-design section of the Solution Lab also officially launched with a successful stakeholder kick-off meeting. Representatives from all relevant Stakeholder agencies, ministries, and water management authorities gathered to provide feedback, discuss project goals, and identify early challenges. The meeting resulted in a clear collaboration strategy, a timeline for further upcoming in-person workshops, and common expectations. This productive session ensured that everyone is aligned and ready to move forward together. Each participating organization sent representatives that will now distribute the information about SLRE internally and delegate tasks working towards the first in-person SLRE Stakeholder Workshop on September 29th.

Introductory slide during the kick-off meeting
Introductory slide of the kick-off meeting.
26–27 February 2026

SLRE Kickoff in Leipzig

The SLRE partners (teams from FZJ, UFZ, GFZ and KIT) met in Leipzig for the first time to officially kick-off the project. The heart of the meeting was to establish a common understanding of the project goals and objectives. Beyond that, the team worked together to already define key demo Storylines and minimum requirements for the first digital twin prototype, which will be developed over the next few months. A particular focus of the discussions is how to integrate innovative ways of interactions, such as AI chats and Agent-based frameworks into SLRE. In the end, the meeting was a great motivation to start working on the project and to bring the SLRE vision to life.

SLRE kickoff group photo
The SLRE team during the kickoff meeting.

About

Knowledge transfer diagram

Solution Lab Rur Erft (SLRE) is a collaborative research, development, and co-design project for the Rur-Erft region. Supported by the Helmholtz Water Initiative (https://www.wasser.helmholtz.de), SLRE brings together scientific modeling, digital infrastructure, and practical experience from stakeholders in administration, water management, agriculture, and related sectors. The project aims to turn complex hydrological questions into understandable storylines that help people explore possible futures, compare risks, and identify robust options for action. In particular, SLRE focuses on extreme water events such as multi-year droughts, floods, and rapid runoff events, and on how these phenomena affect groundwater, surface water, agriculture, ecosystems, and water allocation.

SLRE is built around three parts: the Digital Twin, co-designed Storylines, and the Interactive Solution Room. The Digital Twin provides the technical foundation by connecting models, data, emulators, databases, and visualizations. The co-designed Storylines ensure that the questions, priorities, and experience of stakeholders shape what is explored. The Interactive Solution Room is the shared space where these elements come together for exchange, interaction, and joint interpretation of results. In this sense, SLRE follows a Transfer-by-Design approach: knowledge transfer is not added at the end, but is built into the project from the start.

By combining interdisciplinary science with a strong regional focus, SLRE aims to establish a practical framework for knowledge transfer in water-related decision making. The project is intended not only to address key challenges in the Rur-Erft region, but also to demonstrate how digital tools and stakeholder collaboration can support resilient water management under changing climate conditions. Looking ahead, the approach is designed to be scalable beyond individual catchments, with potential application at national, continental, or even global scales, and to be transferable to different models as well as different stakeholder groups. In this way, SLRE serves as both a regional solution lab and a test bed for future approaches to interactive environmental modeling.

Competence

Digital Twin

The models below form the core of the SLRE Digital Twin. Rather than a fixed simulation pipeline, this ensemble is designed to be steered from the outside: the questions stakeholders bring, the interventions they want to explore, and the storylines developed through co-design all shape what gets run, at what resolution, and with what assumptions. The goal is a modelling system that is as responsive to real-world decisions as it is to scientific ones.

Climate

Climate

  • Regional climate modelling
  • Integrated climate services
  • Numerical weather prediction
  • Forecasting
ParFlow

Surface & subsurface hydrology

  • Soil water content
  • Groundwater recharge
  • Runoff and discharge
  • Irrigation demand
RIM2D

Hydraulics

  • Flood area
  • Flood depth
  • Impact maps
LASSO

Agriculture

  • Crop yield
  • Crop type adaptations
DROUGHTMAS

Socio-economy

  • Agent-based modelling
  • Adaptive land-use decisions
  • Irrigation demand
  • Irrigated area

Storylines

CONV_BLUE
Storylines are shaped through exchange between the SLRE team and the stakeholders.

Water management starts with the right questions. In SLRE, those questions come from the people who actually deal with water every day: farmers, water authorities, municipalities, and regional planners. Co-design is how we make sure their knowledge and priorities shape the science, not the other way around.

Together with stakeholders, we develop Storylines — concrete problem statements and intervention scenarios that describe plausible futures for the Rur-Erft region. For example: What happens during a multi-year drought if irrigation demand keeps rising? And how does a managed aquifer recharge scheme change groundwater levels downstream? These storylines are not abstract thought experiments but the direct input that drives the Digital Twin.

This is meant by Transfer-by-Design: the link between practice and science is built into the project from the start. Stakeholders are consulted from the very beginning and they co-author the questions that the models are asked to answer. The result contributes towards solving real-world problems and scientific insights in the Rur-Erft region that are actionable and meet actual stakeholder needs.

Interactive Solution Room

ISR
Discussion in the Interactive Solution Room.

If co-design is where we build the storylines together, the Interactive Solution Room (ISR) is where it is lived. The ISR is a shared physical and digital space — a room where you can immerse into the Digital Twin and move through it, rather than just look at it from the outside.

Sessions in the ISR are guided but open-ended. Participants explore what happens when they pull different levers: change a crop pattern, open a sluice, impose a drought restriction. As a result, for example, agent-based models make individual actors visible within the simulation, so the feedback between human decisions and hydrological outcomes becomes something you can see and feel, not just read in a table.

Thus, Transfer-by-Design for us is to develop an intuition for the system, to argue with it, to be surprised by it. The ISR is where that happens: where the science becomes a shared experience, and where solutions can start to feel real.

Team

Partners

The SLRE Team consists of collaborators from four Helmholtz research centres.

Stakeholders

Our stakeholders and supporting organisations:

Coordination

Stefan Kollet

Prof. Dr. Stefan Kollet

Speaker

IBG-3, Research Centre Jülich

s.kollet@fz-juelich.de

Christian Poppe Terán

Dr. Christian Poppe Terán

Coordinator

IBG-3, Research Centre Jülich

c.poppe@fz-juelich.de

Resources

Reports

Relevant policy reports underlying the Solution Lab Rur Erft:

  • EN European Commission (2025). Communication on the European Water Resilience Strategy. COM/2025/280 final.
  • EN Madani, K. (2026). Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. doi:10.53328/INR26KAM001
  • EN World Economic Forum (2026). The Global Risks Report 2026. 21st edition, Geneva.
  • DE WBGU – Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen (2024). Wasser in einer aufgeheizten Welt. WBGU, Berlin.
  • DE Ministerium für Umwelt, Klimaschutz und nukleare Sicherheit (2023). Nationale Wasserstrategie. Berlin.
  • DE Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft (2024). Schlüsselressource Wasser: Wasserkrisen und die Helmholtz-Initiative „Wassersicherheit für Mensch und Umwelt im 21. Jahrhundert“. White Paper.
  • DE Landesamt für Natur, Umwelt und Verbraucherschutz Nordrhein-Westfalen (2021). Kooperationsprojekt GROWA+ NRW 2021. Teil IIa: Modellierung des Wasserhaushalts in Nordrhein-Westfalen mit mGROWA. LANUV-Fachbericht 110.

Scientific Literature

Peer-reviewed publications underpinning the models and methods used in the Solution Lab Rur Erft:

  • Apel, H., Vorogushyn, S., & Merz, B. (2022). Brief communication: Impact forecasting could substantially improve the emergency management of deadly floods: case study July 2021 floods in Germany. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 22, 3005–3014. doi:10.5194/nhess-22-3005-2022
  • Guan, X., Nissen, K., Nguyen, V. D., Merz, B., Winter, B., & Vorogushyn, S. (2023). Multisite temporal rainfall disaggregation using methods of fragments conditioned on circulation patterns. Journal of Hydrology, 621, 129640. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2023.129640
  • Heilemann, J., Klassert, C., Samaniego, L., Thober, S., Marx, A., Boeing, F., Klauer, B., & Gawel, E. (2024). Projecting impacts of extreme weather events on crop yields using LASSO regression. Weather and Climate Extremes, 46, 100738. doi:10.1016/j.wace.2024.100738
  • Heilemann, J., Klassert, C., Nagpal, M., Werner, S., Klauer, B., & Gawel, E. (2026). Trapped in irrigation: Future irrigation expansion amplifies food–water–energy policy trade-offs in Germany. Earth's Future, 14, e2025EF007226. doi:10.1029/2025EF007226
  • Herrmann, F., Chen, S., Heidt, L., Elbracht, J., Engel, N., Kunkel, R., Müller, U., Röhm, H., Vereecken, H., & Wendland, F. (2013). Zeitlich und räumlich hochaufgelöste flächendifferenzierte Simulation des Landschaftswasserhaushalts in Niedersachsen mit dem Modell mGROWA. Hydrologie und Wasserbewirtschaftung, 57(5). doi:10.5675/HyWa_2013,5_2
  • Herrmann, F., Keller, L., Kunkel, R., Vereecken, H., & Wendland, F. (2015). Determination of spatially differentiated water balance components including groundwater recharge on the Federal State level – A case study using the mGROWA model in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany). Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 4, 294–312. doi:10.1016/j.ejrh.2015.06.018
  • Herrmann, F., Kunkel, R., Ostermann, U., Vereecken, H., & Wendland, F. (2016). Projected impact of climate change on irrigation needs and groundwater resources in the metropolitan area of Hamburg (Germany). Environmental Earth Sciences, 75, 1104. doi:10.1007/s12665-016-5904-y
  • Nagpal, M., Klassert, C., Heilemann, J., Klauer, B., & Gawel, E. (2026). Measuring crop acreage adaptation to changing yields and prices: An empirical analysis for agriculture in Germany. Preprint (not yet peer-reviewed).
  • Nguyen, V. D., Vorogushyn, S., Nissen, K., Brunner, L., & Merz, B. (2024). A non-stationary climate-informed weather generator for assessing future flood risks. Advances in Statistical Climatology, Meteorology and Oceanography, 10, 195–216. doi:10.5194/ascmo-10-195-2024
  • Vorogushyn, S., Han, L., Apel, H., Nguyen, V. D., Guse, B., Guan, X., Rakovec, O., Najafi, H., Samaniego, L., & Merz, B. (2025). It could have been much worse: spatial counterfactuals of the July 2021 flood in the Ahr Valley, Germany. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 25, 2007–2029. doi:10.5194/nhess-25-2007-2025

© 2026 The SLRE Team

Last update: 2026-07-26

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