MTA Honours HUN-REN Research on Climate Change and the Ecological Health of Rivers

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences established the Environmental Science Youth Award in 2010 to recognise the achievements of early-career researchers working in environmental science. Through the award, the Academy seeks to promote the protection of both local and global environments, the conservation of biodiversity, and the development and adoption of environmentally friendly technologies.

The competition is open to peer-reviewed environmental science papers published within the previous five years that represent a significant scientific contribution. This year's winners were selected by the Sustainable Development Presidential Committee, chaired by evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry. This year, two researchers from the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network were among the recipients of the award.

Nándor Csikós, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Soil Sciences of the HUN-REN Centre for Agricultural Research, works on ecosystem restoration and received the award for his 2025 Nature Geoscience paper, Limited carbon sequestration potential from global ecosystem restoration.

Restoring degraded ecosystems is widely regarded as one of the most promising nature-based solutions for mitigating climate change, yet its global carbon sequestration potential remains uncertain. Using a machine learning-based modelling framework, Csikós and his colleagues estimated how much carbon global ecosystem restoration could realistically sequester by the end of the 21st century. Their findings suggest that restoration could remove no more than 85–97 gigatonnes of carbon by 2100 — substantially less than previous, more optimistic estimates. The study also shows that climate change itself could further reduce this potential. At the same time, ecosystem restoration remains essential for conserving biodiversity, maintaining ecosystem services and improving local environmental conditions.

Zsuzsanna Nemes-Kókai, Research Fellow in the Functional Algology Research Group at the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, investigated how declining precipitation affects the composition of benthic diatom communities in the River Rába. Her award-winning paper, Continuous precipitation loss induced more pronounced compositional and diversity changes in the lotic phytobenthos than one-off drought events, was published in Ecological Indicators in 2023.

Drawing on a 15-year dataset, the study examined whether individual drought events and the long-term decline in precipitation observed in recent years have similar or different effects on the river's phytobenthic diatom communities across the Rába catchment. The results showed that isolated drought years had little impact on community composition or diversity. By contrast, the sustained decrease in rainfall proved to be a major driver of change in both species composition and functional traits, leading to significant declines in taxonomic diversity and functional richness.