The DEMOTAPE project (Designing multi-knowledge protocols to transform transboundary policies for hydroclimatic extremes) aims to establish evidence-based approaches to address infrastructure and livelihood impacts from hydroclimatic extremes and to meet the informational needs of stakeholders for improved governance. With an international and interdisciplinary team from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, we develop an environmental intelligence protocol that brings together multiple data streams from ground-based, satellite and citizen sources, models and policy support systems.
The purpose of the project is to design and apply an integrated knowledge framework to enhance international water cooperation on hydroclimatic extremes. Transboundary river basins suffer from a lack of institutional capacity as well as face challenges of technological capacity to better mitigate and adapt to floods and droughts. The project aims to better link recent developments in environmental intelligence to inform transboundary water diplomacy with particular attention towards impacts on infrastructure and livelihoods.
Focusing on two sites, the Maas/Meuse river basin in Europe and the Brahmaputra River in Asia, DEMOTAPE explores participatory approaches that strengthen knowledge generation and develop knowledge systems that are sensitive to local contexts.
Our project part at IRI THESys is to develop decision-support models for the Brahmaputra basin in a co-design process together with local stakeholders. Using the feedback from stakeholders, a decision support system will be developed that can run the procedural model and simulate the effects of environmental drivers and water management decisions. The developed model will be integrated into a data assimilation framework to provide a decision support system prototype capable of forecasting floods and river navigability conditions.
The project findings will contribute to advancing practices of water diplomacy and policies of international water cooperation.
The project would like to thank the European Commission and UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF); Dutch Research Council (NWO); Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for funding in the frame of the collaborative international consortium DEMOTAPE financed under the 2022 Joint call of the European Partnership 101060874 — Water4All.
Project Team
- PI: Prof. Tobias Krüger (IRI THESys)
- Postdoc: Dr. Márk Somogyvári (IRI THESys)
Project Partners
- King’s College London – King’s Water Centre
- Wageningen University & Research
- University of Geneva
External Website Link
WaterClimate
