IWRM-net

IWRM-NET is an ERA-Net project, coordinated by the International Office for Water and funded by the European Commission, that has started in January 2006 and will end in 2010.

The 17 research programme managers currently involved has decided to tackle the challenge of implementing new research activities at national and regional levels in the field of Integrated Water Resource Management with a strong focus on the Water Framework Directive.

In this part, you will get the IWRM-NET picture helping to understand why such a network (reasoning behind IWRM-NET), going through its vision, objectives, first steps, who is doing what (project summary) and the presentation of each work packages.

 Contact : Natacha AMORSI - IWRM-net Project coordinator n.amorsi[@]oieau.fr

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is among today’s core environmental policies in all European countries that are transposing the Water Framework Directive (WFD). This Directive came into force on December 22nd 2000 (Directive 2000/60/CE) and lays down objectives to be achieved within the set deadline of 2015, such as: - Good status of surface, groundwater and coastal waters (good ecological and chemical status of surface water, quantitative and chemical status of groundwater).

Since the beginning of the 2000’s, this Directive has induced water managers and policy makers to develop entirely new approaches and operational modes, thus triggering the complete renewal of research demand. Besides ecological aspects, the Directive also questions economic issues (optimization cost / efficiency of programmed measures), accounting, resources monitoring, water good governance, reduction of pollution, and, more specifically, the reduction of discharges (priority substances) and, more generally, the evolution of interactions society/environment.

Many clusters were implemented under the impulse of the Commission to facilitate the exchanges and the cross-fertilisation between projects relating to close or complementary topics. Projects financed by the national and local authorities are even more numerous ; not only national administrations (ministries), but also organisations for local water management, and in particular basin organisations (French agences de l’eau, confederaciones hydrographicas in Spain, for example) or regions (Lander in Germany), develop important applied research programmes, intended to reinforce their base of knowledge for implementing their policies. But, even at national scale, even at local scale, outputs of supported projects are not always very well known by those in charge of policy-making or implementation. OIEau, the coordinator of this proposal, and INBO, the International Network of Basin Organisations, felt that it was needed to gather all these bodies to get a good picture of the European knowledge / efforts in the field of IWRM, with a lot of anticipated overlaps between programmes. More information...