The winner of the 2025 IAHS Falkenmark Award for best PhD thesis has been announced as Dr Vinícius Bogo Portal Chagas from Brazil for his PhD thesis entitled "Hydrological extremes in Brazil: Large-scale patterns, mechanisms, and change". He has provided significant contributions to the understanding of large-scale patterns, mechanisms, and climate change impacts on water availability and coupled hydrological extremes in South America.
The award ceremony is scheduled to take place during the upcoming IAHS Scientific Assembly in Roorkee, India from 5 - 10 October 2025.
Congratulations Vinícius!
Citation for Dr Vinícius Bogo Portal Chagas by Archana Sarkar, IAHS Vice President
The Falkenmark Award for best PhD thesis recognises outstanding contributions to hydrological understanding of water scarcity and water supply in one or more financially disadvantaged countries.
I am happy to announce that Dr Vinícius B. P. Chagas from Brazil is the winner of the 2025 Falkenmark award for his PhD thesis on “Hydrological extremes in Brazil: Large-scale patterns, mechanisms, and change”.
Dr. Chagas is a talented young researcher who has successfully defended his PhD Dissertation in August 2023, being awarded a double diploma from Vienna University of Technology in Austria and Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. In his dissertation, Dr. Chagas lays down an innovative framework to analyze and model climate change impacts on both floods and droughts. He has done so by building the most complete hydro-climatological dataset of Brazil and analyzing climate change impacts on floods and droughts in the last century.
His models combining process-based hydrological knowledge with statistical tools improved identification, detection and assessment of climate change impacts on floods and droughts in large geographical areas. This approach allowed him to demonstrate for the first time how climate change, deforestation and water use intensified hydrological extremes more than expected. The quantification and understanding of such intensification have a direct implication of water resources management by demonstrating that current design levels are underestimated in vast swaths of the Brazilian territory with impacts across diverse production sectors.
Several of his dissertation products are significantly impacting disaster risk and water resources management in Brazil, in an exemplary fast technological transfer between academia and the industry. The hydro-climatological dataset he developed has been accessed more than 8000 times. In Brazil, his drought model is being applied to estimate drought flows for water use allocation in streams with limited or no data. The changes in return periods for both floods and droughts, as calculated in his acceleration of the water cycle paper, are being adopted as a technological solution to assess climate risk impacts in sanitation infrastructure of Santa Catarina State, one of the most affected by floods and landslide disasters in Brazil.
Response by Dr Vinícius Bogo Portal Chagas
Thank you for the kind words. I am honored to receive the Falkenmark Award. I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof. Pedro L. B. Chaffe and Prof. Günter Blöschl, for guiding me through this journey. I would also like to thank my parents and my wife for the support and encouragement. I believe that science is based on collaboration and working together across the continents.
The IAHS community has been a big inspiration since I was an undergraduate student, so I am deeply moved to receive this recognition. Great rewards come from working with hydrology; we can truly contribute meaningfully to society. Thank you.