Water Scenarios for Europe and for Neighbouring States
(SCENES) is a four year European Union Integrated Project with 23 partner institutions which will develop and analyse a set of comprehensive scenarios of Europe’s freshwater futures up to 2025. The project will cover all of “Greater” Europe reaching to the Caucasus and Ural Mountains, and including the Mediterranean rim countries of north Africa and the near East.

The scenarios will

• provide a reference point for longterm strategic planning of European water resource development,
• alert policymakers and stakeholders about emerging problems, and
• allow river basin managers to test regional and local water plans against uncertainties and surprises which are inherently imbedded in a longer term strategic planning process.

The scenarios developed by SCENES will be policy-relevant by identifying the requirements of stakeholders and decision makers, and including stakeholders in the scenario building process. A true cooperation will be an essential element of the research methodology and dissemination of the results — an active process of interaction among scientists, policymakers and stakeholders representing different water use sectors will be guaranteed throughout the life cycle of the project.

The involvement of the Land Use and Agriculture Program within SCENES centers around driving forces. Specifically, LUC is working to produce spatial databases of land use, soil, agricultural cropping patterns, and agricultural water demand. LUC is also responsible for delivering spatial population, GDP, and energy data, applying knowledge from other IIASA programs. All these datasets will be used to quantify spatial water demand and use for agriculture, industry, energy, and households and will be used to inform the scenario building process. Once scenario storylines are developed, LUC will work to quantify the qualitative water scenarios developed by the stakeholders in terms of the developed datasets. Technological change, policy change, changing socioeconomic conditions, and a wide range of uncertainties and methods for dealing with uncertainties in scenario development will be integral parts of the research. Participation in SCENES will bring LUC closer to its goal of integrating land and water resource research to improve its methodologies and estimates of global potential production.

Responsible for this page: Elisabeth Kawczynski
Last updated: 09 Nov 2009