Functional water resources management is recognized as an essential component of equal and sustainable socio-economic development. This is even more crucial given the increasing human pressures and climate change impacts on water resources.
Coping with these and other challenges requires quantitative, affordable and high-quality knowledge and data about present and past water availability and use, including quantity, quality, and spatio-temporal variability in both past and future climate scenarios.
In Albania, the abrupt socio-economic transition in the 1990s undermined the previous institutional framework, with a severe impact on the efficiency and reliability of the water resources monitoring system. While the network of gauging stations over the country has been scarcely upgraded and maintained over the last decades, a wide gap in institutional coordination affects today’s data collection. Administrative, technical, and management responsibilities are fragmented among several national agencies. As a consequence, desirable targets such as those foreseen by the European Union Water Framework Directive are more laborious to be achieved.
Quantitative and accessible knowledge of the variability of flow rates in rivers and of water levels in lagoons and the sea is a key prerequisite for any sustainable management action of these water bodies.
In this context, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation – AICS Tirana – has been supporting national and local institutions in the last years through various initiatives, fostering their technical capacity to improve water resources management and environmental protection.
Within the NaturAlbania project, AICS Tirana is funding the implementation of a pilot action for open-source hydrometric monitoring within the Vjosa river watershed. In line with the recommendations of the EU – highlighting in Chapter 27 the importance for Albania to develop a river basin management plan for the Vjosa corridor given its regional importance in terms of ecologic services and ecotourism potential – the objective of the action is to provide the competent bodies, namely AMBU, NAPA and respective RAPAs, with effective tools that allow them to continuously and reliably monitor water levels in different sections of the Vjosa. The availability of such data in a freely accessible format is a key prerequisite to prevent and manage extreme events such as floods, whose occurrence will likely increase due to climate change, and represent a fundamental step to develop and implement sustainable river basin management plans that can be successfully replicated in other contexts. Within this pilot action of the NaturAlbania project, the University of Trento and the University of Genova are collaborating to install long-term, sustainable pilot solutions to enhance water resources monitoring.