7 Outlook

As water is a cross-cutting focus across natural environment, socio-economic development and public health and wellbeing concerns, water resources management can’t be undertaken in isolation. Implementing appropriate measures, either to ensure the sustainability of water resources and water dependent ecosystems or to secure the water supplies which society and the economy depend on, water management requires the involvement of numerous stakeholders. As underlined by the OECD (OECD and UNECE, 2014), sectoral competition for water in Eastern Partnership countries is already intensifying as water demands grow over time. These trends require urgent actions to be taken in various domains of water resources management, including changes in legal framework, better integration of institutions, introduction of strategic planning, increased financing, and development of human resources. The importance of using available data and information to support knowledge-based policy making should be underlined. A key process is sharing available data and information among national water agencies, as well as with external stakeholders, along with integrating all data relevant to water resources management. This will help provide a robust baseline for developing water-focused environmental policies, not only at the national level, but also at the regional level – an essential process in improving cooperation among the transboundary river basins.

The experiences already available from the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD), as well as data harmonisation and sharing under the EIONET voluntary dataflow, will bring tremendous inputs into the national and regional processes of data exchange in the Eastern Partnership countries.

comments (0)

7.1       Needs for integrated water resources management

EU water legislation places the river basin management approach at the core of water management policy. Countries draft River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs) in line with WFD, either for selected rivers or for the whole country, many with international support. For example, Belarus and Ukraine prepared the Upper Dnieper River Basin Draft River Management Plan with the support of the European Union and EPIRB Environmental Protection of International River Basins (Koszta et al., 2016). With the EPIRB project support and that of the European Union Water Initiative Plus for the Eastern Partnership (EUWI+, 2019), ENI East countries are improving knowledge and skills for development of elements of RBMPs. These include: water body delineation and typology, classification of status of water bodies based on available data, identification of data and information gaps to improve monitoring, identification of pressures and development of programs of measures, public involvement, and awareness raising activities. The main beneficiaries of these projects are the environment ministries, which gives hope that ENI East countries will soon start establishing management plans themselves.

comments (0)

However, there are still a number of important institutional and managerial challenges for countries to face. Specifically, attention should be given to the establishment of river basin councils, the development of models and practices of public involvement, and the production of credible data. The challenges still ahead include: the development of a positive attitude towards data sharing; the need to assess the environmental status of water resources; and to identify key pressures on the waters.

comments (0)

As water management is cross-sectoral, countries set up various water related agencies to deal with different aspects of managing water at the local and national level. However, in many cases, data and information exchange among the respective water agencies either remains insufficient to inform decision-making, or is hampered by a reluctance to share the agencies’ ‘own data’ with other agencies. Even where agencies are willing to participate in data exchange, it is common for monitoring systems to be incompatible, or the data formats not comparable among the water agencies.

comments (0)

In order to bring together experiences from the EIONET and WFD implementation in the EU, the ENI SEIS II East project has initiated water quality data harmonisation in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. In addition, the project supported the development of pilot water information systems in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to enable a common platform among the water agencies where they can share the harmonised water data.

comments (0)

Nevertheless, much remains to be developed in the near future in terms of data collection, harmonisation and integration to support the implementation of integrated water resources management in the region. In many cases, measures for the implementation of integrated water resources management requires actions at the basin level rather than national level. Hence, integrating statistical and spatial data is becoming very crucial for countries in the region.

comments (0)

7.2       Future works

There are numerous environmental protection and natural resources management projects running at the national and regional levels, many of them funded by international organisations and communities such as European Union, OECD, UNECE, World Bank GEF etc. Sustainability of the activities and ownership of products made under the projects remain a serious concern for the further improvement of data collection, knowledge creation and underpinning knowledge-based policymaking.

comments (0)

Even if data and information are available, a lack of capacity often creates a bottleneck in supporting policy makers. To overcome this issue, we propose to develop targeted data collection, data harmonisation and integrated assessment of the water resources in the region. Development of such data and information system presents tremendous potential in the Eastern Partnership countries.

comments (0)

The United Nations System for Environmental and Economic Accounting Central Framework (EC et al., 2013) integrates economic and environmental data to provide a comprehensive view of the interrelationships between the economy and the environment, and the stocks of environmental assets, as they bring benefits to humanity. It contains internationally agreed standard concepts, definitions, classifications, accounting rules and tables for producing internationally comparable statistics and accounts. It is a formally recognised statistical standard by the UN Member countries. As there is a clear relationship between data collection, water accounts and indicator (information) development (Figure 25: Indicator pyramid and its relationship with water accounting development through SEEA. Adapted from Mazza et al. (2013).), the development of water accounts will support the six countries in designing their monitoring programs, the organisation of their databases, as well as streamlining and developing their indicators.

comments (0)

Figure 25: Indicator pyramid and its relationship with water accounting development through SEEA. Adapted from Mazza et al. (2013).

comments (0)

Based on the experiences from the pilot studies in Belarus and Azerbaijan under the ENI SEIS II East project, the outputs of water accounting using SEEA methodology give a strong basis for decision-makers to develop water resources management measures around issues such as water allocation and the identification of areas for urgent measures.

comments (0)

7.2.1        Institutional cooperation and capacity building

While a good knowledge capacity already exists in terms of water resource issues, the majority of water management institutions would benefit from investing in data processing capacity to treat their own datasets. This would provide the basis for effective data standardisation and increase the possibility of data sharing among institutions. In addition to technical capacity, legal support (especially in terms of data sharing protocols) is needed for facilitated sharing.

comments (0)

While the ENI SEIS II East project has offered support in terms of developing technical infrastructure at the national level[1], this can only be fully effective once institutions are able to provide good-quality data inputs to the portals, and the institutional content experts are able to communicate their technical needs to the information technology support staff. It is thus advised that there is further capacity-building, especially in terms of developing chains of cooperating experts.

comments (0)

While the manual handling of data by content experts without advanced IT application is currently feasible, there is significant potential in further developing of the assets through:

  1. Common understanding of the benefits of dedicated data management support in all phases of dataflow (collection, storage, processing, assessment, publishing) by all involved national institutions; this would be followed by policy decisions towards centralisation of infrastructure.
  2. Employment and development of dedicated data management experts; rather than outsourcing production of web portals, the dedicated data management experts would be an important link between IT developers and water topic content experts; based in respective institutions, they would be able to support all phases of the dataflow.

In addition to purely technical expertise, understanding the knowledge-building potential of the rich datasets available at the institutions would make way for various derived products, such as more detailed environmental indicators, spatial analyses, and environmental data integration and mining.

comments (0)

7.2.2        Development of water information systems

In addition to the technical capacities that have been developed by the national institutions with support by ENI SEIS II East project, further growth of infrastructure such as information system software according to the best-available standards is advised.

Water information systems deployed in 2020 in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are offering the cooperating institutions the following functionality:

  • Data dictionary and harmonised water quality dataset, which enables dataset comparability between different institutions;
  • SQL database, data processing protocols and procedures for water quality indicator production;
  • Web portal, which enables data and information presentation through text blocks, dynamic and interactive charts, and GIS visualisations.

Effective use of the established information systems depends on two key processes. These should be followed and reviewed after the systems have been in place for some time, with all involved stakeholders able to use them.

The first process is to enhance staff expertise in using the information systems. It is an ultimate goal of capacity building to establish a functioning team of both water content and IT experts working in synergy, and who are able to successfully communicate regarding issues and requests. The institutional working processes that use the information system should be well-established, documented on a centralised platform, and repeatable.

The second process is that technical features of the portal should be reviewed for their efficiency and upgraded where needed. While the information systems were built in a way to be easily upgraded, the focus of further technical development should be on the following:

  • Deployment of different databases containing water data, thus centralising national datasets and facilitating their sharing; this would also decrease the need for many data managers in individual institutions, which are largely not present now.
  • Establishment of data management procedures; this includes repeatable processes of data collection, QA/QC, storage, dataset assessment, and production of dissemination products (charts, maps, etc.); currently, only the basic data management procedures are in place, but serve as a starting point to develop further processes.
  • Development of further environmental indicators, potentially expanding beyond the topic of water; these environmental indicators should be based on clearly defined data analysis processes;
  • Collecting and managing spatial datasets, enabling spatial analysis and presentation of data on interactive maps; currently, only basic spatial presentation is available on the existing information systems.

comments (0)

7.2.3        Monitoring programs, data and information exchange among water agencies

Water monitoring systems are mostly implemented as a state service, divided into regional divisions in the areas of hydrometeorology (water quantity), geology (groundwater), hydrochemistry (water quality), hydrobiology (ecology) and public health (drinking water). All countries have monitoring programs on water resources and water use, however, the usability of that data in policy making needs further interpretation as the data is mostly collected and managed in a very fragmented manner among several governmental services and agencies. This often creates bottlenecks in compilation and organisation of water quantity data, for example, in developing water asset and flow accounts with the aim of identifying water availability and sectoral pressure on water resources (Globevnik et al., 2018).

comments (0)

In all countries, data on existing water resources and water use is annually reported to state statistical offices. They publish (bi)monthly bulletins and annual statistical books. As regards water quality, they inform on exceedance of limit values, but do not deal with integrated status assessments and trends over long periods. Overall, water policy recommendations are missing.

comments (0)

Water state services and agencies in the six countries are generally very reluctant to share their data and information on different domains of water management, which inhibits comprehensive integrated assessments at national or regional levels. Staff turnover, combined with frequent reorganisations in the water agencies or respective ministries, cause the loss of ‘institutional memory’ and lower capacities of the water agencies to be effective. For instance, the Republic of Moldova reorganised its Ministry of Environment three times between 2017-2019. Similarly, Georgia changed the structure of its Ministry of Environment twice in the same period.

comments (0)

Efforts under the implementation of the ENI SEIS II East project aimed to partly overcome the problems of data and information availability and harmonisation at the regional level by means of developing water indicators with the methodology of the EEA, as already implemented in the EEA Member countries. In addition, the project supported the development of water information systems in three Caucasus countries by replicating the overall structure and philosophy of the Water Information System of Europe.

comments (0)

Similarly, a set of UNECE water indicators, C1-C5 and C10-C11, that has been used as the main inputs to the development of this report, has been developed jointly with the national experts by following the EEA indicators template. The overall purpose of this work was to build the capacity at the national and regional level in using available water data to support knowledge-based policy making.

comments (0)

The ENI SEIS II East project also put emphasis on standardising and sharing the datasets needed for indicator composition. Further maintenance and sustainability of similar datasets should be ensured as of the ENI SEIS II project. This includes mobilisation of water data experts who deal with knowledge-building and environmental assessment; and IT experts who offer technical support in data processing, dissemination and sharing.

comments (0)

[1] Web based water information systems are developed in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia as other products of the ENI SEIS II East project.

comments (0)