E-Mail IMAGE: The Eder dam (Germany) in the year 2019. Areas of water that are drying out release considerably more carbon than areas covered by water. view more Credit: Maik Dobbermann Among other things, dams serve as reservoirs for drinking water, agricultural irrigation, or the operation of hydropower plants. Until now, it had been assumed that dams act as net carbon stores. Researchers from the Helmholtz Centre of Environmental Research (UFZ) together with Spanish scientists from the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA) in Girona and the University of Barcelona showed that dams release twice as much carbon as they store. The study has been published in