BeWater project partners meet up in Tunisia
The BeWater project is entering its final year. The project partners gathered in Hammamet (Tunisia) on 19 and 20 April for the 6th steering committee meeting to discuss major project tasks that will be completed during remaining months. These tasks include, amongst others, the completion of the River Basin Adaptation Plans for four case study river basins, the development of a handbook on best practices, the policy analysis and the organisation of several events and the final conference. The project partners will meet again in spring 2017.
On the first day, the project partners briefed each other on recent achievements and tasks ahead. During March and April 2017 the third round of stakeholder workshops was organised in in the Pedieos, Rmel, Tordera and Vipava river basins. The outcomes of these workshops were presented by the case study partners CyI, INRGREF, CREAF and IzVRS and Ecologic Institute, illustrating how these outcomes will be used to finalise the River Basin Adaptation Plans, which will be published during summer 2016. Lessons learnt during the development of these river basin adaptation plans will be synthesised in a handbook. This handbook aims to constitute a reference for other Mediterranean river basins by offering experience-based guidelines outlining the different steps and considerations involved in designing a river basin adaptation plan. The handbook will be published by the end of 2016.
Within BeWater a comparative analysis is made of water policies and other sector policies which address global and climate change at the river basin scale. Deep Blue Consultants is guiding this analysis developed by case study partners. A policy analysis tool has been piloted and will now be used by the case study partners to conduct a more quantitative analysis to compare policy frameworks between countries. Deep Blue Consultants engaged with the Law Department of the University of Palermo for support on this process.
During the final months of the project, BeWater will organise a series of events. Europe4Business will organise a Concertation Workshop in Brussels in January 2017. This workshop will bring together coordinators of international cooperation initiatives and the owners of funding programmes to encourage the synchronisation of support instruments to international cooperation in climate change research. This will be followed by policy workshops in each of the four river basins and a policy workshop in Brussels in February 2017. Finally, the BeWater partners discussed the River Basin Adaptation conference, which will be the final conference of the project. The conference will be organised by EFI and IzVRS on 7 and 8 March 2017 in Nova Gorica, which is located within the Vipava river basin.
The second day of the meeting consisted of a field trip to the Rmel river basin. The project partners visited the Rmel dam, hydro-agricultural structures located in the Sbayhiya subwatershed, the Group of Agricultural Development of “Wadi Sbaihya”, the plant nursery of “Sidi Zid”, the ecological farm “Dar Zaghouan” and the National Park of "Jebel Zaghouan".
More photos of the meeting and the field trip are available here.
Photo credits: Christos Zoumides and INRGREF
