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First pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum, Nicosia (Cyprus); 30-31/10/2012
1st pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum
The 1st pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum was held on 30-31 October 2012, in Nicosia, under the auspices of the Cyprus EU Presidency. The Forum was opened by H.E. Sofoclis Aletraris, Minister of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment, Cyprus. The forum was organized in close cooperation with the European Commission and the Cyprus Water Development Department.
http://www.eu-drought.org/newsevents/10813457/The-1st-pan-European-Drought-Dialogue-Forum
 H.E. Sofoclis Aletraris: Minister of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment (ANRE) in Cyprus |
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Dr. Jauad El Kharraz (EMWIS) presenting HALT-JUCAR-DES project |
The objective of the Drought Dialogue Forum, was to create an exchange platform among policy-makers, stakeholders and the scientific community on science-policy interactions. The Forum is an interactive drought dialogue which aims at the reduction of future Europe’s vulnerability and risk to drought by using results provided by the research community. Policy makers and researchers were together in order to transfer the benefits from research to address real-life drought problems.
A lot of research findings are already available on drought, but drought as natural hazard and its impacts are still a major problem for water users and policy makers. That is why transferring the outcomes of research to forecast, prevent, and mitigate drought impacts, is a major challenge of this 1st pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum and the DROUGHT-R&SPI project.
The first day was dedicated to the link between science and policy at different stages of policy development: design of policy; its implementation, in particular on the context of the WFD river basin management planning; and then its review. The time-frame of policy making and research are often different, and therefore they need to meet at specific dates (design, implementation, review), if they want to be interactive (science influencing policy and vice-versa). The Forum discussed policy options of the Blueprint to safeguard Europe’s waters, which will be adopted under the Cyprus EU Presidency on 26‑27 November 2012 in Cyprus.
On the basis of the discussions of the first day, the DROUGHT-R&SPI Science-Policy-Interfacing pillar of project will focus, in its next steps, on the improvement of the transfer of research findings to water management on different scales (river basin, national, pan-EU) and on sharing the presented best practices, coming from different EU regions.
During the second day, the focus was on an exercise using a fictive Mediterranean river basin, suffering from drought. Twelve different projects covering various scales and categories (as FP7 projects, EU development projects, national research projects with an international dimension, and Interreg projects) accepted the invitation to participate (including our project: HALT-JÚCAR-DES). On the basis of the outcomes of their respective projects they proposed pragmatic solutions to prevent or mitigate the effects of drought in the fictive basin. The presented solutions were tackling different periods of time and impacts: before the drought event, during the event and after it. The DPSIR (Drivers, Pressures, State, Impacts, and Responses) framework and some specific WFD articles were leading for the dialogue.
This exercise highlighted the wide range of policy responses as well as the need to establish synergies among different research and demonstration programmes.
The experiences from the 1st pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum will be included in a position paper that is meant for policy makers and stakeholders. The results will also be presented at the 3rd Science Policy Interface workshop on “Water science meets policy: How to streamline knowledge to address WFD challenges?”, Brussels, 14-15 November 2012. Moreover a science paper is planned on the multi-project intercomparison.
The pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum in Nicosia will have follow-ups in Lille (2nd Water Framework Directive Conference, June 2013), Greece in 2014 during the Greek EU-Presidency, and Brussels in autumn 2014 (concluding).
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The main organizer: Drought R&SPI Coordinator; http://www.eu-drought.org/
Drought R&SPI project (Fostering European Drought Research and Science-Policy Interfacing) is a collaborative project funded by the EC under the FP7 Cooperation Work Programme 2011, Theme 6: Environment (including climate change, ENV.2011.1.3.2-2: Vulnerability and increased drought risk in Europe (Grant agreement no: 282769). The Drought-R&SPI project started at 01/10/2011 and will continue for 3 years.
- The 1st pan-European Drought Dialogue Forum
- Technical Report No.3
- Technical Report No.2
- General Assembly Report
- DROUGHT-R&SPI flyer
Project objectives:
- Drought as a natural hazard, incl. climate drivers, drought generating processes and occurrences
- Environmental and socio-economic impacts
- Vulnerabilities, risks and policy responses, incl. the further development of drought management plans in support of EU and other international policies
Work packages:
- WP1: Natural hazard
- WP2: Impacts - Case studies
- WP3: Impacts - pan-European scale
- WP4: Science-Policy Interfacing: Dialogue Fora
- WP5: Coordination – Management
