Project Harmonised Techniques and Representative River Basin Data for Assessment and Use of Uncertainty Information in Integrated Water Management (HarmoniRiB)
Headed by Jens Christian Refsgaard, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (DK)
Partners RIZA (NL), CNR-IRSA (I), UFZ (D), CEH (UK), UVA (NL), DHI (DK), TUC (GR), UCLM (E), PM (CZ); Dr. M. Rode, K. Poser (Department Hydrological Modelling); Dr. B. Klauer, K. Sigel, Dr. J. Mysiak (Department Economics)
Financing 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission "Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development" EVK1-CT-2002-00109)
Time Period 10.02 - 03.06

Brief description

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) provides a European policy basis at the river basin scale. The river basin management and planning process prescribed in the WFD focuses on integrated management, involving all physical domains in water management, sectors of water use, socio-economics and stakeholder participation.

In most cases information available to the decision makers in the physical, ecological and socio-economic domains is deficient, incomplete and uncertain. Yet decisions have to be made on the basis of available data. To aid decision makers in dealing with uncertainties, HarmoiRiB will develop a methodology to quantify uncertainty in data and models and to assess the propagation of uncertainty from the raw data to concise management information and decision making.

To support the research, a network of eight representative river basins has been selected. These river basins will provide datasets suitable for this purpose. This implies that the datasets, in addition to covering the diversity in terms of ecological regimes and socio-economic conditions found across Europe, will have built-in information on the uncertainties in the data.

The specific objectives of the HarmoniRiB project are:

  • To establish a practical methodology and a set of tools for assessing and describing uncertainty originating from data and models used in decision making processes for the production of integrated water management plans.
  • To provide a conceptual model for data management that can handle uncertain data and implement it for a network of representative river basins.
  • To provide well documented datasets suitable for studying the influence of uncertainty on management decisions and provide examples of their use.
  • To disseminate and results among researchers and end-users across Europe and obtain and incorporate feedback on the methodologies tools and the datasets.

Links

  • HarmoniRiB homepage
  • Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (DK)
  • RIZA
  • CNR-IRSA
  • CEH
  • UVA
  • DHI
  • TUC
  • UCLM
  • PM
  • 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission "Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development" (EVK1-CT-2002-00109)