Jan Cools

University of Antwerp | UA · Institute of Environment & Sustainable Development

Declining water availability also has a negative impact on food and energy security e.g. for hydropower and irrigation. However, the water, energy and food sectors are often managed separately, potential leading to conflict and ineffective actions. This paper describes the role of River Basin Organisations to improve the governance of the so-called...

This document is the official policy document of the European Commission on natural water retention measures (NWRM). It has been endorsed by all 28 Water Directors. The policy document aims to promote the uptake of more natural measures in water management. Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM) are multi-functional measures that aim to protect an...

This report presents the result of applying the framework in five cases in or on the cross roads between agriculture, forestry and fisheries where considerable pressure on biodiversity is exerted. The cases were selected based on several criteria with the aim that they together cover as broad span as possible of: Relevance for biodiversity (from ha...

A modelling approach is presented that determines the most cost-effective set of reduction measures to reach an in-stream concentration target. The framework is based on the coupling of two models: the hydrological water quality model SWAT and an economic optimization model (Environmental Costing Model, ECM). SWAT is used to determine the relations...

Governments and international organizations are increasingly determined to create more sustainable food value chains (SFVCs). However, only little empirical evidence is available on how SFVCs are understood. Enquiring African food value chain actors allows gathering valuable insights into their perception of sustainability, which characteristics of...

Incorporating natural spaces within urban areas has been shown to have multiple benefits. However, despite greening and adaptation strategies at different levels of government, progress remains slow with a lack of easy to use and comprehensive tools identified as key to overcoming this. This paper presents a co-designed tool with academic and local...

Being confronted with increasing and expanding urbanisation and the loss of natural green spaces, our living environment is threatened more and more by the effects of global climate change. Green infrastructure is often thought of as the solution to increase climate resilience and reinforce the quality of the lived environment simultaneously. While...

Water quality standards (WQS) set the legal definition for safe and desirable water. WQS impose regulatory concentration limits to act as a jurisdiction-specific legislative risk-management tool. Despite its importance in shaping a universal definition of safe, clean water, little information exists with respect to (dis)similarity of chemical WQS w...

Tef grain color is considered as the dominant parameter in the trading and price setting on the local markets. However, there are no comprehensive studies conducted so far on the preference and perception of actors on tef grain quality attributes and factors affecting it. Its implicitly assumed that other quality parameters also play a role in the...

Ecosystem services (ESs) include the benefits people receive from ecosystems that support the socio-economic requirements and human well-being. The Man and Biosphere (MAB) programs are a scientific plan in the African context that is linked to governments and attempts to create a systematic ground to enhance the relationship between individuals and...

Good practices in flood and drought risk management

As a response to increasing urbanization and changing weather and climatic patterns, urban green infrastructure (UGI) emerged as a concept to increase resilience within the urban boundaries. Given that implementing these (semi-) natural solutions in practice requires a clear overview of the costs and benefits, valuation becomes ever important. A ra...

Lake Tana is the most important freshwater lake in Ethiopia. Besides pressures on water quality resulting from urbanization and deforestation, the invasion of the exotic water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) poses new threats to the ecosystem. Water hyacinth, endemic to South America, is widely considered as the world’s worst aquatic invasive weed....

Therelationshipbetweenirrigationwateravailabilityandcroprevenueismultifaceted.However,most of the previous studies focused only on the direct effect of irrigation water on crop revenue or considered that the indirect effect passes only through the farmers’ improved farm inputs usage. Nevertheless, unlike previous studies,this study argues that a on...

Development of a clear understanding of the relationship between the availability of dam-driven irrigation water and crop revenue is important in poverty reduction and food security process. As a result, large research efforts are devoted to understanding the relationship between the availability of irrigation water and crop revenue. However, earli...

Mainstreaming biodiversity into the governance of economic sectors such as agriculture, forestry and fisheries is required to reverse biodiversity loss and achieve globally adopted conservation targets. Governments have recognized this but little progress has been made. This paper addresses the following research question: What are the barriers and...

The evaluation examined the effectiveness, efficiency, coherence, relevance and EU added value of the EU Birds and Habitats Directive. It provided evidence to support the European Commission in its Fitness Check of the Directives. The work involved an extensive evidence review, public consultation and missions to 10 Member States.

This paper contributes to the Global Assessment Report (GAR15) on Disaster Risk Reduction, led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). This paper discusses the lessons learned from a comparative analysis of EWS for floods in Europe (Belgium) and Africa (Egypt, Mali) . Though many technical challenges remain in the develop...

This report presents the assessment of the reports Member States submitted to the European Commission under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The Article 12 assessment evaluated three topics: the initial assessment of the state of the marine waters (Art.8), the definition of the Good Environmental Status (Art. 9) and the Environmental...

This report presents the assessment of the reports Member States submitted to the European Commission under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The Article 12 assessment evaluated three topics: the initial assessment of the state of the marine waters (Art.8), the definition of the Good Environmental Status (Art. 9) and the Environmental Target...

This report presents the assessment of the reports Member States submitted to the European Commission under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The Article 12 assessment evaluated three topics: the initial assessment of the state of the marine waters (Art.8), the definition of the Good Environmental Status (Art. 9) and the Environmental Target...

This report presents the assessment of the reports Member States submitted to the European Commission under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The Article 12 assessment evaluated three topics: the initial assessment of the state of the marine waters (Art.8), the definition of the Good Environmental Status (Art. 9) and the Environmental Target...

This report presents the assessment of the reports Member States submitted to the European Commission under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The Article 12 assessment evaluated three topics: the initial assessment of the state of the marine waters (Art.8), the definition of the Good Environmental Status (Art. 9) and the Environmental Target...

This paper provides the synthesis of the special issue on the “role of wetlands in river basin management” and reviews lessons learnt from a comparative assessment of the presented case studies in Europe, Africa and Latin-America. Although wetlands are important for local communities and biodiversity, the services and products they deliver for loca...

The report supports the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 (EC, 2011a) in providing information on key drivers, pressures, and impacts on terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems in Europe.

The role of the present Issue Paper to the "International Conference on Prevention and Management of Marine Litter in European Seas" was to establish for the conference´s participants a common "starting point", from where discussions could be taken forward to approach the conference´s main goal: facilitating the establishment or further developm...

Management and decision making for wetlands need an integrated approach, in which all ecosystem services are identified, their importance are assessed and objectives are formulated about their desired outputs. This approach has been applied successfully in European wetlands with sufficient scientific data. The main objective of this study was to ev...

Europe’s waters face a number of interacting critical problems today. These problems are further likely to be exacerbated with a changing climate. The Blueprint to Safeguard Europe’s Water Resources will set out the Commission’s views on the policy initiatives that will be most appropriate to address these problems. This report sets out the problem...

An early warning system (EWS) for flash floods has been developed for part of the Sinai peninsula of Egypt, an hyper-arid area confronted with limited availability of field data, limited understanding of the response of the wadi to rainfall, and a lack of correspondence between rainfall data and observed flash flood events. This paper shows that an...

The European Commission has launched three parallel studies, of which this study is one, to gather strategic information and support the implementation of the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) requirements on marine litter and further develop the policy framework for this issue. The main objective of this project is to pinpoint t...

The recent shift in flood risk management concedes that floods cannot be prevented but the impacts on and vulnerability of the risk prone communities can be reduced. Beyond mere structural defence, an integrated risk management approach deploys a diversified set of measures that moderate the economic and social drivers of risk and improve risk gove...

Water resources management can be challenging when confronted with pollution, water shortage, floods, water-related diseases, climate change and variability. In this thesis, it is assessed how the management of a multi-functional river basin can be facilitated through the development and testing of analytical tools in data-poor and data-rich contex...

In this paper we describe the procedures and data acquisition for flood risk mapping as a first step into an effective flood risk management in Reni. This work is part of a Flemish funded project named “Building capacities for effective flood risk management in the Ukrainian part of the Danube Delta”. The aims of this project are 1) share expertise...

The Flash Flood Manager project (acronym \“FlaFloM, co-funded by the EU under the LIFE Third Countries Fund) is aimed at developing an early warning system for forecasting flash floods in the Wadi Watier catchment, located in the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt). The system consists of a number of components, which are automatically activated and linked: a...

For the implementation of the European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD), technological and scientific support are required. This paper presents a methodology to support a first step of the implementation of WFD, which is the delineation of groundwater bodies. The methodology consists of (1) the development of a complete and generally-accepted...

The technique of measures choice for water protection investments which based on the DSS “Hydromanager" usage was proposed. The estimation of the integrated sensitivity for water quality in the river basin with respect to water user’s emissions changes was considered. The approach is implemented for the conditions of the European Union (EU) on the...

The results of information means creation for the DSS "Hydromanager" for the Nete-river basin (Belgium) are presented. Ecological-economic model is oriented on real data use. The GIS-component of the DSS was elaborated in framework DSS information tools.

Existing groundwater models in Flanders (Belgium) are local small-scale models, which serve various goals and therefore often lead to conflicting results. Furthermore, these models are under management of different organizations and public data are presently insufficient to couple these models to a large-scale groundwater model for the whole of Fla...

Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium, jcools@vub.ac.be, +32 (2) 629-3950 The bio-physical limits for groundwater abstraction, termed as 'sustainable yield', can according to the classical view be obtained when the abstraction rate does not exceed the long-term recharge rate. Limits to groundwater abstraction, however, should...

Existing groundwater models in Flanders (Belgium) are local small-scale models, which serve various goals and therefore often lead to conflicting results. Therefore, a (hydro)geological database and isohyps, isopach and occurrence maps are developed. The database and the maps are based upon the new numerical, hydrogeological code for Flanders (HCOV...