Blöschl is professor, head of the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management, and director of the doctoral programme for water resources systems, all at the Vienna University of Technology (TUV). He is also a part time professor at the University of Bologna.
In its citation, the Stockholm Water Prize Committee said: “Professor Günter Blöschl at the Technical University of Vienna (TUW) is the world’s leading flood hydrologist. He has made groundbreaking contributions to understanding the drivers of increasing flood risks under climate change coupled to the strong influence of regional flood processes. His observation-based connection between climate and floods revealed that the last two decades have been markedly flood-prone compared to the historical record.”
Günter Blöschl, along with Murugesu Sivapalan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, won PSIPW’s 2018 interdisciplinary Creativity Prize for their developing the field of Sociohydrology, which at the time was an unprecedented paradigm shift and a new validated approach for studying the dynamic interactions and bi-directional feedbacks between water systems and people. Sociohydrology allows predictions on a scale of many decades to be made in a changing environment by considering the effects of societal actions on hydrology and the effects of hydrological phenomena on societal development.
Since its first award in 2004, a number of PSIPW laureates have also become recipients of the Stockholm Water Prize.
Stockholm’s 2023 award went to Professor Andrea Rinaldo, the recipient of PSIPW’s interdisciplinary Creativity Prize in 2010. He won the Stockholm Prize “for groundbreaking work with a major impact on several academic fields, including hydrology, hydrogeomorphology and epidemiology.” He had won the PSIPW award along with his colleague Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe (who had separately received the Stockholm Water Prize in 2002) for developing the field of Ecohydrology.
The 2022 Stockholm Water Prize was conferred upon Professor Wilfried Brutsaert who had won PSIPW’s 2018 Surface Water Prize. He won the Stockholm Prize “for groundbreaking work to quantify environmental evaporation. His innovative approach has helped improve climate modeling and tools that assess how much water that is available.” He was awarded the PSIPW Surface Water prize for developing, demonstrating, and validating a new theory using the nonlinear complementary principle that generates unprecedented estimates of evaporation from the natural landscape, with successful applications in numerous locations.
Professor Rita Colwell was the recipient of Stockholm’s 2010 prize for “pioneering research on the prevention of waterborne infectious diseases has helped protect the health and lives of millions.” She subsequently won PSIPW’s 2016 interdisciplinary Creativity Prize for separate groundbreaking work she completed with Professor Shafiqul Islam for using chlorophyll information from satellite data to predict cholera outbreaks three to six months in advance. First awarded in 1991, the Stockholm Water Prize honours scientists, practitioners, and organizations whose exceptional contributions have advanced water science and protection through groundbreaking discoveries and transformative solutions that address global water challenges.
Awarded since 2004, the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water awards scientists for work completed in the previous five years that represents an unprecedented cutting-edge scientific innovation that contributes to the sustainable availability of potable water and the alleviation of the escalating global problem of water scarcity.