Water management in the EU: new virtual marketplace makes know-how available online

To date, experts in the EU could not make sufficient use of the wealth of research results and innovative solutions for sustainable water management. Thus, the European Commission is creating a virtual, central marketplace, whose development is actively supported by adelphi.

With the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) of 2010, the European Parliament and the EU Council laid the foundation for a consistent water policy within the EU. In order to replace the vast number of individual directives for water conservation and to make water usage within the European Union more sustainable and environmentally friendly, the WFD determines uniform and comparable standards and criteria for the water bodies of all EU Member States. Furthermore, Member States are required to develop regular action programmes and management plans for each river basin. For some EU States this still constitutes a considerable challenge.

Although a number of EU-sponsored research projects and innovative practical solutions in the field of water conservation and water management already exist, past experience has shown that until now this know-how has hardly been implemented on a broad basis. This has in part been due to the lack of a modern platform that not only pools the expertise gathered from multiple sources in a central database, but also edits it in a user-friendly fashion and in line with demands.

Instruments and information sources will be pooled on a knowledge platform

Against this backdrop, at the end of March 2015 the European Commission gave the go-ahead for the two-year project "WaterInnEU". The goal of the project is to create a virtual marketplace that summarises the available instruments and information sources in the field of river basin management in a neat and easily usable format. Current research results and innovative strategies and solutions will in this way be able to be gained directly from river basin managers, political decision-makers, industrial experts and interested citizens and then be utilised more easily than before in each individual river basin.

WaterInnEU is funded as part of Horizon 2020 and implemented by a comprehensive consortium of eight institutions and companies. As part of this international consortium, adelphi is carrying out an EU-wide analysis of stakeholders and their application of tools that are at hand for sustainable river basin management.