The GFZ is beneficiary of the European REUNATECH consortium. The project, led by RWTH Aachen, has been selected under the highly competitive Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks 2024 as part of the Horizon Europe programme. It was officially launched in October 2025, and gathers academics and industrial partners with the aim to educate and train Doctoral Candidates (DCs) on risk management and resilience for critical infrastructures (CI), high tech industries (HTI), and communities across Europe against NaTech (Natural hazard triggering Technological accidents). Thirteen DCs students, spread across six institutions in Europe (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, RWTH Aachen University, Roma Tre University, Delft University of Technology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Geoforschung ), are working on this shared topic.
Two of the 13 Doctoral Candidates are based at the GFZ, in section hydrology. They will contribute to risk reduction and resilience from a hydrological perspective. Juliette Salles, supervized by Dr. Sergiy Vorogushyn, will explore novel approaches for regional flood hazard assessment with a special focus on unprecedented flood scenarios. By deriving and integrating detailed spatial information on flood protection structures (levees), she will further develop the Regional Flood Model for Germany. This enables more accurate flood hazard and risk estimations for present and future climates. In his PhD project, Leon Hohenstein will investigate flood risk of companies under global change conditions simulating diverse pathways of adaptation in different climate and economic scenarios. In this regard, he will develop and apply an Agent-Based Model and couple it to the Regional Flood Model to evaluate the effect of adaptive behaviour of small and medium-sized enterprises and other agents on the development of flood risk in Germany. PD Dr Heidi Kreibich is supervisor of this thesis.
GFZ will be lead beneficiary of the work package “Dissemination and Communication” and thus enhanging the promotion of research results through journals, workshops, symposiums, and conferences. The aim is ultimately to connect industry partners, government, communities, and researchers to foster societal resilience. Furthermore, the GFZ will host a training events featuring Datathon and PhD-teach-PhD formats as well as academic secondments of two of the doctoral network’s PhD students.
REUNATECH website: <u>https://www.reunatech.rwth-aachen.de</u>
REUNATECH Training Module 1 in Aachen, April 2026
