Natural Water Retention Measures

It is one of our ongoing projects Aqua.Rekk contributes to.
Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM) are measures that aim to safeguard and enhance the water storage potential of landscape, soils and aquifers, by restoring ecosystems, natural features and characteristics of water courses, and by using natural processes. They are green infrastructure solutions and they support adaptation, reducing vulnerability of water resources.

The NWRM initiative is a project of DGENV for collaboratively building knowledge and promoting best practice on Natural Water Retention Measures in Europe. You can find the key concepts used and resources to help you develop your own measures in the official site of the project www.nwrm.eu . Progressively you will find a catalogue of case studies along with a practical guide to implement NWRMs.

Join the network of experts of the Danube basin on linkedin.

EPI-WATER

Evaluating Economic Policy Instruments for Sustainable Water Management in Europe 2011-2013

A sustainable management of water resources has a potential to tackle water-related natural hazard and climate risks, and at the same time alleviate communities from poverty. In this context, Economic Policy Instruments (EPIs) can help to make water allocation more efficient, water supply more reliable, and water-related risks pressures easier manageable. Furthermore, it can help achieving the environmental objectives of water policy in a cost-effective manner.

The main aims of the EPI-Water project were
- to assess the effectiveness and the efficiency of Economic Policy Instruments in achieving water policy goals, and
- to identify the preconditions under which they complement or perform better than other (e.g. regulatory) policy instruments.

The hompage of the project, www.epi-water.eu provides a detailed source of the work done during the research. 

The guide to enhance the use of EPIs is a synthesis of the program, while the ex-post and ex-ante case studies are the backbone of the work. These are accessible at the "Public Deliverables".

Our main product was the ex-ante case study on Floods and water logging in the Tisza River basin.

For the efficient dissemination of the results we prepared a series of Hungarian language documents that tackle the questions and the potential use of EPIs in case of the most relevant water policy challenges that Hungary faces: floods, droughts and the constraints on land use change the could mitigate them.
  

WFD implementation in Hungary

In the preparation phase of the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Hungary Aqua.REKK contributed to the work of the Economics Task Group that developed the national WBMP.

In a multidisciplinary team of experts our role was the development and test of a methodology and a related decision-support system to develop a cost-effective programme of measures  in order to reach good water status as defined by the WFD. The decision-support system has been tested on several sub basins in Hungary.

Our activities also included developing proposals for the horizontal economic instruments (Background studies to the 7th chapter):

- Connection points of WDF goals and the local water management problems - status of the agricultural water service;
- Proposal to upgrade the water resource fee;
- Economic instruments to foster the creation of the water protection areas;

(The Hungarian language documents can be accessed here)