Educating transdisciplinary water professionals for global change: the joint European Master’s programme in Continental Water Sustainability

Global change is increasingly pressing continental water systems through climate variability, accentuated extreme events, ecosystem degradation, urbanisation, and shifting and unpredictable socio-political conditions. These drivers interact across scales and sectors, generating complex and often unforeseen systems responses. Addressing such challenges requires professionals who are able to think beyond disciplinary boundaries, work with uncertainty, and co-develop solutions with diverse actors rather than applying predefined technical recipes. These challenges are especially relevant in the field of geoscience, and water sciences in particular, calling for educational approaches that go beyond codified knowledge, explicitly fostering creativity, collaboration, and confidence in interdisciplinary and multicultural contexts.

This contribution presents a new educational approach starting in September 2026, offered by the consortium EUCOR – the European Campus and the Ecohydrology Programme by UNESCO, an international 2-year Master Course on Continental Water Sustainability (https://switch.unistra.fr/formation/master-cws/) to train young talents in transdisciplinary and sustainable management of inland water socio-ecosystems, at the intersection of natural sciences, social sciences, and engineering. Crossing borders, the Master Course CWS will provide a double-degree jointly offered by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany) and the University of Strasbourg in cooperation with ENGEES (France).

The training programme will bring together academic experts and experienced practitioners to train small, interactive groups of students in problem-solving in hydrosystem management. Practical work includes the harmonization of human use and nature's needs for water, nature-based solutions (NBS), climate-change urban and landscape adaptation, modelling and planning, ecopsychology and technological innovation. We aim at graduating so-called “hydro-nexialists”, professionals specialized in water-related content, but who are able to see connections between disciplines, are skilled in conflict resolution, and are able to solve complex problems by employing an evolutive project design. While the first year introduces our students to novel learning techniques and approaches to navigate in complex themes, the second year almost exclusively consists of practical courses with relevant stakeholders to prepare for professional success and efficiency in socio-environmental problem-solving. The course, delivered in English, is open to all students having a BSc in Natural and Engineering Sciences related to water and the environment.

The programme is used here as a case study to reflect on how education in water sciences can be adapted to better prepare students for global change. We argue that this educational model supports the development of professionals capable of navigating complexity and uncertainty in water systems and offers transferable insights for geoscience education more broadly.