Changing Water Cultures (CANALS)
CANALS explores how a community adapts to global warming when there is an increase in extreme weather events (such as heavy rainfall) due to climate change.
Main content
The project has two goals:
1. To understand how water creates relationships between people in urban spaces and how these relationships are changing due to climate change
2. To develop a process for stakeholders to acquire the knowledge they need to adapt, i.e., to create new relationships.
For some years now, the signs of global climate change have become increasingly visible in Germany. Thus, weather phenomena that were previously considered very rare are occurring more frequently and more intensively. This also holds true for the city of Reutlingen, which has experienced several extreme weather and flood events in recent years, such as the hailstorms of 2013 and 2021 or the floods of 2013, 2018, 2019 and 2021. Many people perceive weather and climate phenomena as increasingly unpredictable and thus more worrying.
The Changing Water Cultures (CANALS) project addresses this phenomenon through "water glasses". In the future, climate change is likely to result in an increased amount of water in relatively short periods of time (heavy rainfall events) with the associated small-scale effect of too much water (flood events) or too little (droughts and dry spells) – all of which will have a considerable impact on public life in settlement areas of cities and municipalities.
The CANALS project is led by Dr. Simon Meisch in cooperation with the Universities of Tübingen and Bergen and the City of Reutlingen.
The contact person on the side of the city administration is Patricia Mittnacht, head of the Task-Force Climate and Environment.
Project duration
2021-2023
Project team
Principal investigator: Dr. Simon Meisch
Kooperationspartner der Stadt Reutlingen:
Daniel Oppold (RIFS, Potsdam)
Project funding
EU Horizon 2020 framework programme – Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895008
