Survey: A five-year review of the Ahr floods
How can I take part in the survey?
If you are one of the 79,341 citizens selected to receive an invitation by post in early August 2026, we would be delighted if you took part in the citizen survey conducted by the Bonn-based ‘SOZIAHR’ research team. To take part, you will need your personal access code, which you will receive by post along with the invitation.
The SOZIAHR research project’s large-scale citizen survey will begin in early August 2026. Current and former residents will be asked about their personal circumstances following the floods in July 2021 and their experiences of the reconstruction process. The initial findings will be analysed and presented to the public by April 2027.
79.341
(former) residents of the Ahr Valley are invited to take part in the survey.
(anyone who was registered in the neighbouring municipalities in 2021 and can still be contacted via the registration offices there)
9
thematic areas will be covered by the questionnaire.
(also including, direct and indirect impact of the floods, private reconstruction, political attitudes, social support and the political response to the flood disaster)
26
months of preparation time were used to develop the questionnaire specifically for the Ahr Valley.
(including site visits, feedback from experts, discussions and pre-tests with those affected, as well as consultation with the Trauma Help Centre)
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
SOZIAHR stems from an initiative by Susanne Bell, who attended Calvarienberg Gymnasium in Ahrweiler and found herself knee-deep in mud during the summer and autumn of 2021. Shortly afterwards, she wrote her Master’s thesis on how people coped with everyday life in the first year following the flood disaster. Whilst her Master’s thesis was still in progress, she sought to establish links with other researchers at the University of Bonn. This led to two successful project applications, which will fund the SOZIAHR project from June 2024 until presumably August 2029.
We are aware that you have often been asked to take part in scientific surveys and that their results do not usually have any direct bearing on your life. With our study, however, it is different. We will analyse our findings as quickly as possible and actively present them to the local authorities and politicians in the Ahr Valley, as well as to higher levels of government. To ensure this is done effectively, we have been working with numerous partners in the field for years, monitoring regional debates and regularly organising solution-oriented workshops.
It is very important to our research team that as many residents of the Ahr Valley as possible are able to take part in the survey. That is why we are broadening the scope considerably beyond just those who have suffered flood damage directly to their own property. We invite everyone who was registered with their primary residence in one of the municipalities of Adenau, Altenahr, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Sinzig or Grafschaft as of the cut-off date of 14 July 2021 to take part in this survey.
Note: We have contacted all individuals who are still registered in these municipalities today (including those at different addresses to before) or who have moved a maximum of once since then.
We requested the contact address details from “KommWis – Kommunale Informationsverarbeitung Rheinland-Pfalz GmbH” in accordance with Section 46 of the Federal Data Protection Act (BMG) (request for group information) and Sections 34 and 34a of the Federal Data Protection Act (BMG) (request for data transfer). KommWis requested the address details from the relevant registration offices and transmitted them to us on 9 February 2026 in accordance with data protection regulations.
Your data will be collected in strict confidence and analysed anonymously; in other words, your responses will not be linked to your name or address. Naturally, all legal requirements regarding data protection – in particular the provisions of the GDPR – will be complied with. The survey has also been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Bonn. You can find detailed information on this in our privacy policy for the survey. If you have any queries regarding this, please feel free to contact the SOKO Institute directly, which is providing technical support for our survey: 0800 5254 500
Processing and analysing such a large-scale survey is a challenging task and takes several months to produce reliable results. We therefore plan to publish the initial findings in April 2027. These will be made freely available to everyone on our website and, as a participant, we will be happy to send them to you by email on request. In addition, we will highlight the key findings for press events, media coverage and leaflets, and present them specifically to policymakers, public authorities and practitioners. Last but not least, academic publications in specialist journals will follow.
The questionnaire includes sections on, amongst other things, personal circumstances, direct and indirect impact of the floods, private and business recovery, attitudes towards politics and society, as well as social support and the political response to the flood disaster.
SOZIAHR stands for ‘Social, Economic and Administrative Challenges of Climate Resilience’. We are an experienced team from the departments of Law, Economics, Geography and Sociology at the University of Bonn. We came together in early 2023 because we wanted to learn from the experiences and achievements of the people in the Ahr Valley. The resulting research project, SOZIAHR, has been working since mid-2024 to gather robust social science data and insights into the situation in the Ahr Valley. The project is funded by the Mercator Foundation and the University of Bonn.
The Trauma Support Centre in Lantershofen, as well as numerous local counselling centres, aid organisations and community centres, are here to help you!
You can find the full list of all the contact points listed here.
In emergencies, you can also contact general counselling hotlines 24 hours a day, such as Telefonseelsorge Deutschland on:
- 0800/1110-111
- 0800/1110-222
- 116 123
If you need purely technical or explanatory assistance with completing the survey, you can contact the SOKO Institute directly. On request, the staff there will also be happy to guide you through the survey over the phone:
0800 5254 500
Added (not included in the cover letter)
The survey generally contains a number of complex filters, which mean that the sequence of questions varies slightly for each respondent. We apologise if you find that not every filter is clear. Unfortunately, in some places it was necessary to simplify the questions, even though this means that not every individual case can be perfectly reflected.
Furthermore, respondents who were under 18 at the time of the floods will receive a significantly abridged version, in which, for example, the questions regarding financial loss to the household have been omitted entirely. We hope this will make the questionnaire less burdensome for our very young respondents. Unfortunately, this does mean that in some places in the questionnaire, the transitional sentences may be slightly misleading; we apologise for this.
Contact
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact the project coordinator, Susanne Bell, or the SOKO Institute, which is responsible for conducting the survey.
Susanne Bell M.A.
SOKO Institut
