DAREFFORT PROJECT PREPARATORY WORKSHOP WAS HELD IN BUDAPEST
DAREFFORT project preparatory workshop
The revised „DAREFFORT – Danube River basin Enhanced Flood FORecasting cooperaTion” (title is yet subject of discussion) project potential partners had a 2-days discussion in Budapest on the 10-11th of May, which had been hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Division for the Danube Region Strategy. Almost all countries from the Danube catchment were represented personally, or via web-based conference solution. From 11 countries 15 institutes and 4 international organizations (EUSDR PA5, ICPDR, ISRBC, JRC) delegated the experts to work out the project content and the outputs. The participants became aware of the requirements of the targeted programme (Danube Transnational Programme, Specific Objective 2.1) and the necessary steps in the upcoming weeks. The project application form is planned to be submitted at the end of May, 2017 to the 2nd Call of the Danube Transnational Programme.
The DAREFFORT project main focus is to enhance the access to the recorded hydrological data and to provide coherent distribution for all the countries in the Danube catchment in order to enhance the possibilities of flood and ice monitoring, forecasting. The aim is to support the realisation of the DanubeHIS (ICPDR) and provide long-term development perspective for the sufficient conditions of proper basin-wide hydrological forecasting.
At the moment the number of the potential partners is 24 institutes (16 PP, 5 ASP) and 3 more are considering the active participation. The territorial coverage of the basin is almost total! The project should last 36 months and the probable starting date would be the spring of 2018.
The project shall create a system that would not be possible to establish without a common horizontal project in the catchment. The outputs have multi-layer relevance from the national system development, through the cross-border cooperation until the river basin level. In the project frame an EU Flood Directive measure could be applied at once along the Danube: M41 Preparedness, Flood Forecasting and Warning, Measure to establish or enhance a flood forecasting or warning system. This activity is considered as the most cost effective non-structural tangible solution which highly reflects solidarity principle and supports measures with positive downstream effect in the same time. It will result in a cheaper, easier and flexible data exchange system (DanubeHIS) and long-term sustainability could be guaranteed by ICPDR. The project uses the existing tools and materials at the partners. The basin-wide analyses give a chance to identify weak and critical spots, furthermore discover the topics for research and new project initiations.
