INTEGRATED WATERSHED
MANAGEMENT
REFRESH
AT A GLANCE
Title: Adaptive strategies to Mitigate the Impacts of
Climate Change on European Freshwater Ecosystems
Instrument: Collaborative Project, FP7
Total Cost: 10,024,171 €
EC Contribution: 6,997,746€
Duration: 48 months
Start Date: 1/02/2010
Consortium: 25 partners from 17 countries
Project Coordinator: University College London UCL (UK)
Project Web Site: http://www.refresh.ucl.ac.uk
Key Words: freshwater ecosystems, climate & land
use change, adaptation, mitigation, restoration,
integration
THE CHALLENGE
Understanding how freshwater ecosystems will respond
to future climate change is essential for the
development of policies and implementation strategies
needed to protect aquatic and riparian ecosystems. The
future status of freshwater ecosystems is however, also
dependent on changes in land-use, pollution loading
and water demand. In addition the measures that need
to be taken to restore freshwater ecosystems to good
ecological health or to sustain priority species need to
be designed either to adapt to future climate change or
to mitigate the effects of climate change. REFRESH is
concerned with generating the scientific understanding
that enables such measures to be implemented
successfully.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
The key objective of the REFRESH project is to develop a
system that will enable water managers to design costeffective restoration programmes for freshwater
ecosystems at the local and catchment scales. This will
account for the expected future impacts of climate
change and land-use change in the context of the Water
Framework and Habitats Directives. At its centre is a
process-based evaluation of the specific adaptive
measures that might be taken at these different scales
to minimise the expected adverse consequences of
climate change on freshwater quantity, quality and
biodiversity. The focus is on three principal climaterelated and interacting pressures; i) increasing
temperature; ii) changes in water levels and flow
regimes; and ii) excess nutrients. We focus primarily on
lowland systems as those often pose the most difficult
problems in meeting both the requirements of the WFD
and Habitats Directive.
METHODOLOGY
The Project considers how freshwater ecosystems
(rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and riparian wetlands) in
Europe will change over the next fifty years and it uses a
combination of novel experiments and modelling to
generate the understanding and tools needed to
implement an adaptive management strategy. We will
use a series of carefully designed, co-ordinated field
experiments in which river, lake and wetland sites have
been selected to represent a gradient of climate
conditions across Europe. These will be supported by
laboratory and mesocosm experiments, analysis of
major databases that enable time-space modelling,
further analysis of long-term time-series assembled
during the Euro-limpacs project and by evidence from
palaeoecological studies where extreme events and
abrupt transitions in the past have been recorded. All
these approaches will be combined to help develop the
process-based models needed to run scenarios for
adaptive strategies and which are required for upscaling from local to river basin.
EXPECTED RESULTS
REFRESH will provide an improved prediction capacity
of the hydrological and hydrochemical response of
surface waters to land-use/management and climate
change and the subsequent changes in aquatic
ecological interaction. REFRESH will have a major
impact on restoration planning by showing how
scenarios for changes in future climate, land-use,
nitrogen deposition and water resources can be
combined and down-scaled to the catchment level. It
will provide an understanding of how key adaptive
strategies for managing temperature, hydrology and
nutrient changes in catchments will impact on water
quantity and quality and on the ecological structure,
functioning and biodiversity of surface waters. Key
outputs will include the development of a set of
principles and guidelines that will allow managers to
assess vulnerability to climate change, a new system of
indicators that will enable changes in freshwaters
affected by climate change to be monitored effectively
and a catchment modelling framework that will allow
decision makers and managers to generate forecasts
under different scenarios that incorporate alternative
adaptive measures and enable optimum choices to be
made that also acknowledge uncertainty and risk. A
methodology will be provided that will allow the costeffectiveness of alternative adaptive strategies to be
modelled and evaluated. A detailed guide to the
successful implementation of measures at a catchment
scale will be provided that recognises socio-economic
barriers as well as ecological challenges. REFRESH will
show how an integrated approach to water-body
assessment and management can be developed for any
European catchment using a series of catchments
representative of the main climate regions in Europe.
Ultimately RESFRESH will provide a comprehensive
overview of adaptive management principles and
measures required to modify key directives and advise
national governments and environment agencies.
PROJECT PARTNERS
University College London, UK
Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, (Canada) CA
Aarhus Universitet- National Environmental Research Institute, DK
Commission of the European Communities - Directorate General Joint
Research Centre, EU
The University of Reading, UK
Stichting Deltares, NL
Finnish Environment Institute, FI
Universitaet fuer Bodenkultur Wien, AT
Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, DE
Biology Centre AS CR, v.v.i., Institute of Hydrobiology, CZ
Alterra B.V.. NL
Eesti Maaülikool (Estonian University of Life Sciences), EE
Natural Environment Research Council, UK
Universitat de Barcelona, ES
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SE
University of Patras, GR
Macaulay Land Use Research Institute, UK
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UNIVERSITE PAUL
SABATIER, FR
Utrecht University, NL
Norwegian Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research, NO
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, ES
Norwegian Institute for Water Research, NO
Middle East Technical University, TR
Trent University, CA
Forschungsverbund Berlin e. V, DE
Australian Rivers Institute (ARI), Griffith University, AU