Austria's Minister of Water, Norbert Totschnig, also congratulated him on this special award, which was preceded by decades of work, particularly in the field of flood research:
“I would like to congratulate Prof. Günter Blöschl on being awarded the Stockholm Water Prize. Just at the end of June, we honored his outstanding achievements in flood research with the Neptune State Prize for Water. With the Stockholm Water Prize, Prof. Blöschl has received what could be called the “Nobel Prize for Water,” the highest international award in water management. Close cooperation between science and politics is crucial to meeting the challenges of climate change. With his research, Prof. Blöschl provides an indispensable foundation from which we in Austria and far beyond benefit. I am proud to have one of the leading minds in flood research among us.”
Within Günter Blöschl's “Vienna School of Hydrology”, he successfully combines topics that are considered separately elsewhere into new fields of research at the interface of theoretical research, computer modeling and practical engineering work. Together with his team of practitioners and theorists, he aims to combine the “two groups” of hydrology in particular – scientific hydrology made up of geography and geosciences versus engineering hydrology made up of statistics, dam construction, and flood protection.
“Today's textbooks have a chapter on groundwater and then a chapter on evaporation. But of course it all belongs together,” emphasises Blöschl. He opens a textbook full of diagrams and equations: “All of this is important – but you won't find a single photo of water in the whole book. There's no link to practical application.” Therefore, Blöschl proposes: “I would call this process-based engineering hydrology. You have to collect data – but to make the best use of it, we need to understand the underlying processes. We need a physical picture of how the different processes of hydrology interact."
Like his doctoral advisor Prof. Dieter Gutknecht to him, Prof. Blöschl has passed on his holistic, interdisciplinary view of hydrology to almost 80 graduates of the “Vienna School of Hydrology,” thus establishing a whole new discipline of socio-hydrology during his career through lively exchange with his colleagues. According to this discipline, there is a strong interaction between humans and water, where changes in water cycles force humans to change their behavior, and human behavior influences those water cycles: “You can directly incorporate a human component into the formulas that describe the behavior of water,” says Günter Blöschl. “Mathematical models allow us to view nature and humans as a joint system.” This idea of socio-hydrology began in 2012 with Blöschl's paper and has since developed into a new branch of water research, leading to thousands of publications and discussions internationally, such as at the Socio-Hydrology Conference in Tokyo in July 2025, where Blöschl gave the keynote speech.
Günter Blöschl has already received numerous awards, including an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council and the Horton Medal from the American Geophysical Union. He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and was a senator of the Helmholtz Association for the research field “Earth and Environment”.
Blöschl emphasises that the Stockholm Water Prize is something very special for him – a true highlight of his career. The prize has been awarded annually since 1991 for outstanding achievements related to water. The laureates include not only personalities from the scientific community, but also people from NGOs and politics who have made outstanding contributions to the provision, purification and protection of water.