OUTLAST and SPS Blue Nile Present Project Results at Joint Final Conference in Bonn

On 27 November 2025, the projects OUTLAST and SPS Blue Nile held their joint final conference at the Gustav Stresemann Institute in Bonn, bringing together researchers, regional representatives, international organisations, donors and practitioners to present and discuss the project’s key results.

Both projects aim to improve water management through global and regional drought early warning systems for different sectors including agriculture and hydropower. Keynotes, live demonstrations, and stakeholder perspectives by the project partners were followed by discussions on the science-practice transfer of methods and results developed over the course of the projects, lessons learnt, and long-term applications of the developed systems.

In a joint presentation, Harald Kunstmann (KIT), Axel Bronstert (University of Potsdam) and André Müller (adelphi) presented the key results of the SPS Blue Nile project. The presentation covered methods and technical realisation, hydrometeorological forecasting, hydrology and sediment transport, the development of a policy paper on forecast dissemination in the Blue Nile catchment, co-designed climate services, and the establishment of the Pycast S2S community.

Among the participants were representatives from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), Intergovernmental Authority on Development Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), and partner institutions from Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kazakhstan, Romania and the United Kingdom. The following day, both project teams hosted a half-day technical workshop for practitioners, introducing their products and systems to a smaller group.