GWSP Archive: GWSP Workshop on Environmental Flows 2013

This GWSP Workshop will be held by the Global Water Needs Initiative (GWNI) in Bonn, Germany, 30 September – 2 October 2013. The workshop is organized by Claudia Pahl-Wostl at the Center for Development Research in Bonn, Germany. It will be sponsored by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

The workshop follows the 1st GWNI workshop in Bonn, 14 – 16 November 2011. Following, a short summary of the 1st workshop will be given. World leading scientists in the fields of environmental flows and water governance developed together with practitioners with professional backgrounds in ecology, hydrology, economics and governance ideas for joint activities. These joint activities lead to the development of a conceptual framework and the derivation of a universally applicable classification system for sustainable environmental flow requirements (EFR). The will help to determine the limitation as well as the potential of the transferability of EFR from one case study to another. The classification system will improve the representation of EFR in global models and help to analyze already existing empirical evidences. The conceptual framework and the classification system will be tested on regional case studies and compared, analyzed and validated in shared research protocol. The submitted proposal for funding to the Belmont Call on Freshwater Security was not accepted due to budget limitations.

The 2nd upcoming GWNI workshop will start with the developing of alternative funding sources to realize the joint activities. Also the establishing of an inventory of data that could be used a synthesis will be discussed as no new data collections are available but the need for standardization is given. Furthermore the detailed, more accurate elaboration of the idea of the classification system and framework which has been discussed in the 1st workshop will be another important topic of the upcoming workshop which is now outlined in the COSUST review paper (in press).

The joint research team is formed by Claudia Pahl- Wostl (University of Osnabrück), Graham Jewitt (University of KwaZulu-Natal), Elena Nikitina (EcoPolicy), Stuart Bunn (Griffith University), Rebecca Tharme (Nature Conservancy), Keith Richards (University of Cambridge), Maja Schluter (Stockholm Resilience Centre), Louis Lebel (Chiang Mai University, Thailand), Anik Bhaduri (GWSP), Matthew McCartney (IWMI), Christian Knieper (University of Osnabrück).