Management of urban water resources in Central Europe facing climate change

The regions of CE need to increase their resilience to such extreme weather events as urban droughts, urban floods as well as depletion of urban groundwater resources. Climate changes pose a risk to water resources availability in many EC countries. Both falling groundwater levels in long term and the excessive amounts of water in short period becomes urgent risk and poses a threat to the geotechnical stability of buildings and infrastructure. The current practises of water management in European regions are not enough in the wake of increasing problems induced by Climate Change. There is a strong need in the regions to deliver new deep-rooted use of spatial planning regulatory elements to promote climate change resilient drainage management in relation to urban water resource quality. To achieve the results, project partners will jointly work out following outputs: cooperation network, 6 pilot actions, 6 solutions, action plan and strategies. All the jointly developed solutions within the pilot actions will have innovative character and have not been used so far in the involved regions ranging from the use of the historical irrigation system to feed the declining groundwater level, andending with technologies for the reuse of rainwater for various urban purposes. As a result, the solutions adopted by public administration will bring the change in practices of water management and spatial planning to increase the resilience to climate change in regions. In three years of cooperation we expect that undertaken activities and established cooperations will allow to increase awareness of local and regional policy makers through implementation of joint developed good practices to climate change adaptation of regions in the context of urban water management.Finally, the magnitude of impact of project results and related change will be much higher than the sum of the result of the local action if they would be implemented alone.