AquaStress Mitigation of Water Stress through new Approaches to Integrating Management, Technical, Economic and Institutional Instruments
Country: EU Projects
Start Date:   1/1/2004         Duration: 60 months         Project Type: 
Contract Number: 511231-2 -
Organisation Type:  EC Project
Topics: 
Water and sanitation-->Water and sanitation Overview
Water resources and their management -->Water resources and their management Overview
Project objectives: 
AquaStress intends to deliver guidelines to implement integrated water stress mitigation options at local, regional and European scale. AquaStress delivers 
a 'culture change' in approaches to water stress. It will achieve this through:   
  
Major advances in the understanding, effectiveness and empowerment of stakeholder driven participatory decision making in water management at local 
and regional scales;   
New insights into the pressures and drivers of water stress in different regions of the EU, and in the regional aggregation of stakeholder based decisions; 
  
New assessments of diverse policies, institutions and cultural factors as causes and remedies to water stress, leading to new measures of the effectiveness 
and side effects of mitigation options;   
New approaches to the integration of diverse multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary expertise for participatory vulnerability assessment and adaptive 
planning;   
The development of IT knowledge management tools to support this new management approach;   
Identifying areas where new technologies would have the most impact in mitigating water stress;   
A culture change in the European approach to water management, from centralist infrastructure dependency towards a distributed, bottom-up, adaptive 
integrated systems approach.
Project Summary: 
Water stress is a global problem with far-reaching economic and social implications. The mitigation of water stress at regional scale depends not just on technological 
innovations, but also on the development of new integrated water management tools and decision-making practices.  
  
AquaStress is an EU funded integrated project (IP) contract n°511231-2 - 6th Eu Framework Programme for RTD (http://www.cordis.lu) - delivering interdisciplinary 
methodologies enabling actors at different levels of involvement and at different stages of the planning process to mitigate water stress problems. The project 
draws on both academic and practitioner skills to generate knowledge in technological, operational management, policy, socio-economic, and environmental 
domains. Contributions come from 35 renowned organizations, including SMEs, from 17 Countries.  
  
AquaStress generates scientific innovations to improve the understanding of water stress from an integrated multisectoral perspective to support:  
  
diagnosis and characterisation of sources and causes of water stress;   
assessment of the effectiveness of water stress management measures and development of new tailored options;   
development of supporting methods and tools to evaluate different mitigation options and their potential interactions;   
development and dissemination of guidelines, protocols, and policies;   
development of a participatory process to implement solutions tailored to environmental, cultural, economic and institutional settings;   
identification of barriers to policy mechanism implementation;   
continuous involvement of citizens and institutions within a social learning process that promotes new forms of water culture and nurtures long-term change 
and social adaptivity.   
Aquastress adopts a Case Study - stakeholder driven approach and is organised in three phases; (i) characterisation of selected reference sites and relative 
water stress problems, (ii) collaborative identification of preferred solution options, (iii) testing of solutions according to stakeholder interests 
and expectations. It makes a major contribution to the European Communities objectives stated in the Framework Programme 6th, and supporting the Community 
Directive 2000/60/EC and the EU Water Initiative.
Achieved Objectives: 
See: http://www.aquastress.net/index.php?mod= ...
Product Descriptions:
Additional Information:
Project Resources:

AquaStress Integrated Solution Support System (i3S)
Weblink:
http://www.aquastress.net/
Funding Programme(s): 
EC Framework Programme 6
Link to Organisations:
Submitted by: EUGRIS Team Professor Paul Bardos  Who does what?  23/07/2007 09:44:00