ICT Requirements for an ‘evolutionary’ development of WFD compliant River Basin Management Plans

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) poses an immense challenge to integrated water management in Europe. Aiming at a “good ecological status” of all water resources in 2015, integrated river basin management plans need to be in place by 2009, and need to be broadly supported by stakeholders. Cost effective programmes of measures must be put in place to meet the objective of “good ecological status”. These measures reach beyond the direct water domain and touch on fields such as spatial planning, public participation and socio-economics. Much information and knowledge needs to be available to create these plans. Information & Communication Technology (ICT) tools, such as computational models, are potentially very helpful in designing river basin management plans (rbmp-s). Based on a vision on an evolutionary development of Decision Support Systems in a collaborative planning process, this paper elaborates some key requirements for modelling and ICT. The EU-funded cluster of projects “CatchMod”, including the concerted action “Harmoni-CA”, is discussed from the viewpoint of these requirements.