Welcome to the Water Resources Unit!

	Giovanni Bidoglio Unit Head

The Unit provides scientific assessments to address societal and economic challenges deriving from the evolving vulnerability of the European and global water environment. It contributes innovative solutions to sustainably manage water resources in the face of increasing trends of global population, urbanisation, pollution, over-exploitation, land use and climate change, and ensures that they are adequately linked to policy development and implementation.

• The Unit will deliver integrated impact assessments of water supply, scarcity and demand as a support to the integration of water resource-efficiency considerations into sectoral EU policy areas (agriculture, industry, energy, trade, environment, development cooperation) thus contributing to the Blueprint to safeguard Europe's waters, which is directly related to the EU 2020 Strategy and to the Resource Efficiency Roadmap.
  
  
• Through the assessment of trade-offs between water quality, ecological requirements and water uses, the Unit will contribute to safeguarding natural capital, ecosystem services and biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems while maximizing net social benefits from the use of water by economic sectors. It will develop European and global indicators for water quality, quantity and availability to enable planning of adaptation strategies to changing climate and support integration of knowledge on transboundary water management in EU development and cooperation tools towards growth and poverty reduction.
  
  
• Modelling and monitoring across different scales will be undertaken to enhance our understanding of the interactions between the freshwater, coastal and marine environments, an area playing an important role in the water cycle and of growing socio-economic relevance. The Unit will also support the development of measures to achieve Good Environmental Status in marine waters by 2020 and the creation of climate services for the marine biosphere through the production and analysis of quality-controlled systematic observations at regional and global scale.
  
  
• The Unit will act as driver of interaction between water-related research, standardisation and policy and interface with European Innovation Partnership initiatives to identify crosscutting strategies matching water supply and demand.

The work of the Unit is carried out in five Research Actions:

Action 21203 - PROCAS (Protection and Conservation of European Seas) provides scientific and technical advice on environmental monitoring and reporting for the implementation of the European Marine Strategy and the further development of the Maritime Policy.

Action 22001 - MAPLE (Monitoring across Policies and Environmental Media) provides the science basis for pollutant monitoring across environmental media and policies, plays an anticipatory role in the identification of emerging pollutants, investigates effects at biological level and provides input for modelling of environmental pollutants.

Action 22002 - BIOMES (Biodiversity, Water and Ecosystem Services) provides support to EU biodiversity, nature and water protection policies by focusing on mapping and valuation of ecosystem services, modelling of ecosystem dynamics and tipping points, simulation of scenarios that explore trade-offs, research on climate change adaptation and intercalibration of good ecological status of aquatic ecosystems.

Action 24004 - SOLO (Systematic Observations of Land and Ocean) conducts cutting edge R&D, develops standards and benchmarks for the assessment of existing products and proposes solutions for high quality products and services in the perspective of environmental monitoring and management.

Action 32001 - WQM (water Quantity Management) focuses on the development of improved early warning, monitoring and damage assessment systems for weather-related natural hazards, and of tools for assessing the effects of changes in climate and land use, risk mapping and adaptation to extreme events caused by the current climate or predicted climate.

Contact Info:

Unit Head:
Giovanni Bidoglio - Tel.: +39-0332-789383 E-mail: giovanni.bidoglio(at)jrc.ec.europa.eu

Information Correspondent:
Bernd Gawlik - Tel.: +39-0332-789487 E-mail: bernd.gawlik(at)jrc.ec.europa.eu