Sava River Basin: Sustainable Use, Management and Protection of Resources

Project site: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia

Starting date: September 01, 2004

Duration: 36 month(s)

Project leader: Josef Stefan Institute (JSI)  (Ljubljana - Slovenia)

Project partner:

• Hydro-Engineering Institute (HEIS)  (Sarajevo - Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• Imos Geateh, Planners and Engineers (IMOS GEATEH)  (Ljubljana - Slovenia)
• International Centre for Science and High Technology (ICS-UNIDO)  (Trieste - Italy)
• Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA)  (Oslo - Norway)
• Rudjer Boskovic Institute (IRB)  (Zagreb - Croatia)
• The Mihajlo Pupin Institute  (Belgrade - Serbia and Montenegro)
• University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Agriculture (FABL)  (Banja luka - Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering (UL FGG KSH)  (Ljubljana - Slovenia)
• University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Institute for Agro-biotechnology (BOKU Wien) - Department for Environmental Biotechnology (Tulln - Austria)
• University of Zagreb, Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology (PBF)  (Zagreb - Croatia)

Brief description:

The main objective of this project is to provide local authorities, governments, stakeholders, decision-makers, experts and site owners in the Sava River Basin countries with decision-support tools for the sustainable management of the river basin resources. Until 1991, the methodological bases for data collection have been reasonably unified over the catchment, but lucking a lot of today's important aspects such are ecological character of the river and its tributaries, inventory of pollution sources, dangerous substances, socio-economic parameters, cost and benefit implications and similar. For the later period a lot of data are missing due to insufficient monitoring (financing, recent warfare) and weak institutional and legal control over use of water and land resources of the Sava River catchment.

In this project, specific tools based on the combination of chemical analysis and biological effect methods, and the integration of decision-support systems and database construction will be developed and validated for the pollution monitoring and control. Project partners joined forces to develop an expert data and information management system, which will integrate prediction models for the elaboration of scenarios, remediation measures and best practice techniques for the identification of pollution distribution and trends.