The City as Sponge: Rethinking Water and Heat in Munich

Water and heat extremes are two of the most physical, most immediate ways a changing climate shows up in a city, and also two of the areas where good design pays off fastest. Get water right, and a heavy downpour gets absorbed, stored and slowly released instead of filling basements. Get heat right, and a city stays comfortable through record-breaking summers without relying entirely on air conditioning. Munich Climate Week's second thematic cluster, Water and Heat, is built around exactly that opportunity: shifting from reacting to extreme water- and heat-driven events to designing a city that can adapt to both from the start.

Climate Adaptation & Resilience, Water, and Nature & Biodiversity make up this cluster, and they reinforce each other within a city’s landscape. A resilient city needs somewhere for water to go that isn't a flooded basement. A well-managed water system relies on healthy soil and vegetation to filter and hold what precipitates. And nature does its best work precisely where adaptation and water planning give it the room to do so. Bring the three together, and adaptation stops being pure defence and starts to look like intentional design.

Why this cluster matters – especially in Munich

Munich aims to be climate-neutral by 2035, one of the more ambitious targets among major European cities. Getting there is largely about cutting emissions; staying comfortable and safe along the way, through hotter summers and heavier cloudbursts, is a related but different job, and it's exactly what this cluster is about:

Climate Adaptation & Resilience turns the abstract idea of climate risk into an actual plan. Heatwaves, flash floods, and long dry spells are no longer rare exceptions; hospitals, transport networks, and housing stock now have to withstand them on a recurring basis. This theme covers heat action plans, early-warning systems, and infrastructure built to take a battering it wasn't originally designed for.

Water cuts both ways here. Too much of it, and streets flood and basements fill; too little, and drinking water and groundwater come under pressure. Sponge-city design, sustainable drainage, and careful groundwater management are how a city holds both problems at once instead of trading one for the other.

Nature & Biodiversity can do much of this work naturally, if a city lets it. Green roofs, river floodplains, and healthy soil soak up rain, cool a neighbourhood by several degrees on a hot afternoon, and leave room for species that a paved, drained city otherwise squeezes out. None of that is a side benefit; it is the adaptation.

Munich's own ecosystem is already working on this

A look through Munich Climate Week's partner list shows this cluster isn't just a talking point, several organisations are already doing important work in this area.

On climate adaptation & resilience: The Munich Re Foundation, established by one of the world's largest reinsurers, has made climate risk and adaptation a core focus, running dialogue forums and award schemes that connect academic research on climate risk with adaptation work on the ground, including a forum that examined Munich's own climate targets directly.

On water: Everwave, a clean-tech start-up from Aachen, builds autonomous systems that pull plastic waste out of rivers before it reaches the sea, a hands-on example of what water stewardship looks like once it moves beyond policy and into hardware.

On nature & biodiversity: The Nature Positive Initiative works internationally on pinning down what genuine progress toward a “nature positive” future actually looks like. Closer to home, the German Alpine Association (DAV), one of the world's largest mountaineering organisations, has spent more than 150 years protecting the Alpine landscapes just south of Munich, while Green City e.V. runs hands-on urban greening projects across the city itself.

What to look for in the programme

Good news: the Munich Climate Week programme is live, and it's packed with sessions that are a perfect fit for this cluster! Under Climate Adaptation & Resilience, look out for “Fokus Infrastruktur: Von Klimarisiken zu Resilienz” (19 October, EY wavespace™) and “ESG Circle Hub EY x Swiss Re: Resilience over Reaction” (20 October). On Water, “More Than a Wave – The Eisbach: Water, Ecology & Urban Surf Culture” (21 October) connects Munich's famous Eisbach river wave to questions of water ecology, alongside BCG Sustainability Day's Water Roundtable with Quantis (23 October). Under Nature & Biodiversity, “Mehr Bäume für München – Hitzeschutz vor Ort erleben” (22 October) and “Waldumbau im Forstenrieder Park erleben” (23 October) look at urban tree planting and the shift from monoculture to climate-resilient mixed forest. The full programme, with all dates, venues, and registration links, is available on our website.

Feeling inspired? Submit your own event and be part of the programme.

For the current list of partners, visit the Munich Climate Week partners page.

The bigger picture

What makes this cluster compelling isn't any single theme on its own; it's the connective tissue between them. A heat action plan that ignores drainage, or a flood-control project that pays no attention to green cover, only ever solves part of the problem. Munich Climate Week's framing of Water and Heat is, in effect, an argument that adaptation, water management, and nature protection are one continuous system rather than three separate briefs, and that Munich, sitting on the Isar and within easy reach of the Alps, has both the natural setting and the institutional depth to show what that looks like in practice.

The range of partners already active in this space, from a reinsurance-backed foundation studying climate risk to a river-cleaning start-up to one of Europe's oldest mountaineering associations, is itself a good sign. It suggests organisations across finance, technology, and civil society are starting to treat adaptation not as a niche concern but as infrastructure in its own right. Taken together, that work looks like the early foundations of a city that treats water and heat as forces to design with, rather than problems to manage around.