Introduction

Discharges from wastewater treatment plants, households, agriculture and industry pollute water bodies with transboundary effects. Meeting the future demand for clean water will not only become more difficult due to population and industrial growth, but also due to climate change.

In the future, we will need suitable specialists to solve the current challenges facing our sector. The complexity of these tasks requires interdisciplinary cooperation between different specialist areas in education as well as a transdisciplinary link between theory and professional practice. Linking technical and academic education at an early stage supports future interdisciplinary cooperation.

Implementation measures in water protection are cost-intensive and more difficult to communicate with limited public funding. It is therefore important to raise awareness of the problems of our specialist field among the general public in training and professional practice.

In order to achieve the greatest possible benefit in water protection, it is necessary to learn and work at a common level in both countries. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperation in the training of specialists is a success factor for the generational task to be solved, not least due to valid European requirements and the deficits in water quality.