Archive News

March 26, 2025Not only are the numbers of species declining, but the composition of species communities is also changing. This is shown by a new study published in the journal “Nature”.

March 11, 2025Storage hydropower plants contribute to the energy transition, but also affect river ecosystems. Sustainable management should not only account for individual hydropeaking events, but also their cumulative effects.

March 6, 2025For a long time, Eawag's research focus was primarily on water quality. Questions relating to hydrology, bed load or flooding tend to be investigated at WSL or ETH. Eawag is now strengthening its expertise in this area. Today, the ETH Board appointed hydrologist Paola Passalacqua as joint professor at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering and at Eawag.

January 29, 2025Elena Gimmi received an ETH Medal for her dissertation on the influence of bacterial “bodyguards” on the co-evolution of the black bean aphid and its natural enemy the parasitoid wasp.

December 12, 2024Plants and water can mitigate heat in cities. Using Zurich as a case study, Eawag researchers tested a climate model which indicates how large the effect of green and blue spaces is. The model supports urban planning and shows where improvements would be particularly effective.

November 15, 2024The 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 11 to 22 November 2024. The Aquatic Research Institute Eawag is organising three thematic panel discussions on the topic of ‘Swiss innovations for global climate action’ together with the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva.

November 12, 2024A nuclear waste storage facility needs to be secure, even if glaciers were to churn down from the Alps into the midlands in a distant future. This is why Nagra arranged for a study of the sediments that had been deposited in former, deep glacial lakes. The layers are around 600,000 years old, making them much older than the last ice age, which was around 24,000 years ago. Good news for Nagra: it seems that the layers of stone lying beneath have not been eroded by ice since that time.

November 5, 2024The European Research Council is supporting the MEMELAND research project of a European research team with over 13.5 million euros. Nathalie Dubois from Eawag is a member of the group. The aim is to provide a new narrative for European environmental history, offering decisive insights for sustainable agriculture and climate protection in Europe.

October 31, 2024A new publication by Eawag shows that co-cultures of different microalgae are more resistant to pests than monocultures.

October 17, 2024With climate change, hot and dry summers are becoming more frequent, causing water shortages in some regions of Switzerland. Reusing treated wastewater could help to solve this problem. This has been demonstrated by an Eawag team on behalf of the FOEN and some cantons. The researchers also explain what still needs to be done to put the option into practice.