Rescuing the river basins
A river basin or catchment area is a collection of rivers and streams whose waters converge at a single point, usually a lake, wetland or other body of water. In recent years, the EU twinned European river basins with those of developing countries to jointly tackle specific integrated water resources management (IWRM) issues. The EU-funded project 'Coordinating twinning partnerships towards more adaptive governance in river basins' (Twin2Go) is consolidating and processing the results of all these projects. It aims to transfer and apply these results by disseminating them to authorities, decision makers and stakeholders of all basins to remedy the failure of governance systems in this sector. This requires that Twin2Go develop methodology for comparative analysis of all the results that emerge from these projects. The insights, best practices and tools emerging from this initiative will consider water governance and policy in light of climate change to support governance and improve application of results. Twin2Go has already reviewed various approaches for comparative analyses and has developed a unified framework with a detailed questionnaire and guidelines that support collecting data from twinning projects. An enormous amount of data was collected on basins in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. The project has set up an Advisory Board for promoting knowledge transfer from science to practice and offering recommendations on policymaking. Ultimately, these steps and analyses will enable more sustainable governance of water resources in river basins around the world.
