Due to climate change, extreme weather events such as flooding are expected to increase in Germany in the future. This poses hidden risks to the healthcare system that have hardly been the focus of resilience planning to date: restrictions on access to hospitals and the supply of medical products due to flood-related traffic disruptions. This has been revealed by Germany-wide modelling carried out by Dr. Seth Bryant from the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and partners, which thus closes a significant gap in flood prevention. They used the GFZ's regional flood model and expanded it with algorithms that take into account flood spread at the level of transport routes and can simulate realistic detours and travel time delays. This also allows the impact on hospitals that are not directly affected by flooding to be determined. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Sandy soils are among the most challenging environments for agriculture because water drains quickly and nutrients are easily lost. A new long-term field experiment shows that combining biochar with compost and sludge can dramatically improve how sandy soils retain water, offering a practical strategy for farming in drought-prone regions.

In the complex world of soil and water chemistry, certain minerals act like microscopic sponges, soaking up pollutants and keeping our environment safe. Among the most dangerous of these pollutants is hexavalent chromium, Cr(VI), a highly toxic and mobile substance often found at industrial and mining sites. Now, a groundbreaking study published in Carbon Research has identified the specific "superstar" minerals that are best at neutralizing this threat while simultaneously locking away organic carbon.