Water Management in the Ebro River Basin WP6
Overview
Competition for access to water is strong. Water issues are linked to a wide range of other issues and are likely to be affected by many policy areas (such as transport, agriculture and waste management) and also by future climate change. ISA-tools to support policy decisions are thus needed to adequately handle the full range of interlinked domains. A wide range of water -related assessment tools and methods are already available. There are currently several important European and national initiatives addressing water issues and in particular the implementation of the Water Framework Directive stressing various aspects of water analysis, modelling and planning. MATISSE WP 6 focusses on a small selection of available tools and methods and developes a new tool to integrate such knowledge for one EU representative river basin: the Ebro. The new ISA tools for water combine social multiple-agent modelling with spatially distributed hydrological tools. The case study assesses in an integrated way variations and water stresses occurring at several scales.
Stakeholders are actively involved in the research work.
Objectives
The overall objective of WP6 is to develop and apply new policy-relevant tools and methods for ISA within the water domain. The aims are:
- To identify and analyse the key current methods and tools for integrated sustainability assessment for water
- To apply the relevant ISA-tools & methods within the case study area
- To identify gaps in ISA-tools & methods as well as in knowledge for ISA related to water
- To develop a new ISA-water model and scenarios that integrate hydrological, land-use, social-cultural and institutional processes, focusing on the behaviour of stakeholders and decision-makers.
Activities
- Problem definition and identification of stakeholders in the Ebro River basin
- A scoping study for selected aspects of the water domain
- An ISA for the water domain
- Development and use of a new ISA-water model and scenarios that integrate physical, hydrological aspects and social-cultural and institutional aspects
- Analysis of the drivers of un-sustainability
- Development of a narrative about the un-sustainability in the water domain and exploration of alternative policies for achieving a more sustainable situation; this will provide feedback to WP2, WP8 and WP9.
- Synthesis of results
Products
The expected results are a new ISA-model and scenarios that contain two interlinked parts: a physical model representing the hydrological and land-use part, and a socio-institutional model, representing the behaviour of stakeholders and decision-makers.
Research team for WP 6
Inst. of Environmental Science andTechnology, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Centre for Environmental Studies (MICLU),Lund University
Tyndall Centre & CSERGE, University ofEast Anglia, Norwich
International Centre for IntegrativeStudies, Maastricht University
Sustainable Europe Research Institute
Contact: J. David Tabara, AutonomousUniversity of Barcelona jdtabara@terra.es