Water scenarios for Europe and for Neighbouring States (SCENES)

The SCENES project will develop and analyse a set of comprehensive scenarios of Europe's freshwater futures up to 2025, covering all of Greater Europe reaching to the Caucasus and Ural Mountains, and including the Mediterranean rim countries of north Africa and the near East. These scenarios will provide a reference point for long term strategic planning of European water resource development, alert policymakers and stakeholders about emerging problems, and allow river basin managers to test regional and loc al water plans against uncertainties and surprises which are inherently imbedded in a longer term strategic planning process. The scenarios developed by SCENES will be policy-relevant by identifying the requirements of stakeholders and decision makers, and including stakeholders in the scenario-building process. The SCENES project will deliver combined qualitative and quantitative scenarios. The qualitative scenarios (storylines) provide an internally consistent picture of how water resources in different p arts of Europe may develop up to 2025. The quantitative scenarios, produced by state-of-the art models, complement the storylines by providing numerical information and by enriching the qualitative scenarios by showing trends and dynamics not apparent in t he storylines. The qualitative scenario analysis will also focus on water quality, ecological and hydrological aspects, with special regard to the requirements of the WFD. Scenarios will be interactive and adaptive in the sense that they will be developed through a three-phase approach. The first phase will be a fast track pan-European scenario exercise using existing information. The second phase will involve regional and pilot area scenario enrichment. The final phase will be the drawing together of result s and dissemination of the scenario outputs. SCENES is planned as a 4-year Integrated Project with a total budget of 10.1 million EUR, of which 7 million EUR is requested as EC contribution.IP - Integrated Project (FP6-2005-GLOBAL-4