Transboundary water management in the Mediterranean region

The Aoös, one of Europe’s last wild rivers, originates in the Pindus mountains of northern Greece. It flows northwest along the mountain chain into Albania where it takes the name Vjosa and continues to wind through to its mouth at the Adriatic Sea.

The 270 km river is of great ecological value, supporting a huge variety of flora and fauna, and providing water resources to populations living and working along its banks. But the Aoös/Vjosa faces growing challenges as the climate changes, and water management is becoming complex — not least because the river basin crosses national borders.

To help with the management and conservation of the river, Greek water resource management firm EMVIS needed to know how climate change could alter the quality and quantity of the water.

The team at EMVIS carried out a climate change assessment of the river based on data and tools developed by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Their findings show how C3S data and tools could benefit transboundary water management across Europe, something which will become increasingly important as the world’s climate changes.

When problems arise in rivers, they too are shared by neighbouring countries, making them challenging to manage.

The Mediterranean already suffers from significant water management issues, and the effects are being felt throughout the region. Climate change is expected to amplify this problem, as it will have a large impact on precipitation and the availability of water resources.

In transboundary basins such as the Aoös/Vjosa, it can become challenging to plan concerted actions such as regulating water activities, managing discharge, or establishing limits on water-related tourism. Actions in one country can have downstream effects into another, and transboundary cooperation is not always reliable.

Exploring the data

The SMHI team then designed an application to visually explore the dataset housed in the CDS.

The ‘European water and climate data explorer’ lets users quickly and easily visualise CIIs based on combinations of climate and hydrological models.

The application produces detailed maps at local or pan-European scales, which is particularly useful to those in the water management sector — and especially to those working in transboundary areas.

With a clear picture established, EMVIS then went back to the raw data to plug into their own visualisation software.

An external storage platform provides shapefiles– a geospatial vector format – making visualising of the data easy in a range of mapping software. EMVIS plotted the C3S data in their own geographic information system (GIS) software, to help assess the vulnerabilities of different regions around the river to the impacts of climate change.

By using the freely-available data from the C3S, EMVIS researchers used exposure and sensitivity assessments to easily map out the predicted impacts of different climate change scenarios in regions across Greece.

They focused on daily and monthly mean river discharge, and actual aridity under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5. This trial quickly provided clear evidence that there would be increasing drying across the Aoös/Vjosa river basin throughout the 21st century.