the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 04 Apr 2025
Brief communication: What do we need to know? Ten questions about climate and water challenges in Berlin-Brandenburg
Abstract. As climate change escalates, the Berlin-Brandenburg region faces new challenges. Climate change-induced extreme events including droughts, heatwaves, and floods, are expected to cause new conflicts to emerge and aggravate existing ones. To guide future research, we engaged a transdisciplinary academic community of experts to co-develop a list of key questions on these climate and water challenges in the region. Our findings highlight the urgent need for integrated and participatory research approaches. We expect this list of key questions to provide a roadmap for scientists and policymakers to foster actionable knowledge production to address climate and water challenges in the region.
Competing interests: At least one of the (co-)authors is a member of the editorial board of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Journal.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this preprint. The responsibility to include appropriate place names lies with the authors.- Preprint
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Status: open (until 16 May 2025)
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-428', Michael Tsypin, 08 Apr 2025
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The presented `Brief communication` manuscript documents a collaborative effort by a large group of multidisciplinary researchers. The aim of the project was to identify key topics in the fields of climate change and water resources, relevant to the Berlin-Brandenburg region (NE Germany). The paper briefly describes the study area, articulates the need for in-depth research and an actionable mitigation plan, outlines the methodology of the questionnaire, and presents the outcome – a list of proposed scientific questions to be addressed in the coming decade.
I have an overall positive impression of the manuscript. I would like to offer two general suggestions.
- The title of the paper suggests a focus on “climate and water challenges”, yet among the identified 10 questions, there seems to be a bias towards water availability problems. For example, the selected questions in Category 1 and Category 2 are quite specific with respect to water balance of the Spree and Lausitz, while climate-related questions are quite high-level and are applicable almost universally. The same is seen in the Appendix TableS1, where the Water Management category clearly dominates. This, in my opinion, warrants some reflection. Does it have to do with the expertise of the survey participants and their Berlin residence?
- It would be valuable to highlight the transferability of this collaborative and inclusive approach to a broader scientific network and other regions. There must be a reason why the authors present these pressing issues for BBR in the international journal, rather than simply passing them to the local authorities or publishing a white paper. Was there anything original about the methodology worth highlighting? What pitfalls did you identify during the survey? The authors touched on this in the final paragraph of the conclusions, but the message could have been delivered in a more structured way.
My minor suggestions (line-by-line):
Line 13: please add a reference to the D.Hilbert paper.
Line 17-18: use ‘mean annual’ instead of just mean
Line 27: please be more specific, e.g., “carbon dioxide emission reduction"
Line 29: the reference to “the Spree” lacks context. Please clarify that it refers to a river that a densely-populated urban center relies on for water supply, navigation etc. (i.e., what is written later in Lines 32-33)
Line 44: please be more specific, e.g., groundwater storage or quality decline.
Line 48: consider re-phrasing this sentence for clarity.
Line 55: I believe, the referenced paper is from 2011, not 2019. Please also check and cite more recent summaries (like GERICS). Some modelled scenarios project steady or increasing precipitation in Eastern Germany, including summer precipitation.
Line 82: please rephrase for clarity - the top 10 questions selected based on the questionnaire responses were compiled into a list, presented in Table 1
Line 83-84: this reads like a repetition of the information from the Introduction. Can be safely removed. There is no need for brackets in (BBR).
Line 118: Concluding remarks or Conclusions
Line 123 this sentence appears to be out of context: “Drought has been a topic on the research agenda at BBR for a long time”. Or does it belong to the next paragraph?
Line 125 – it is not totally clear what recommendation the authors are referring to.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-428-RC1
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