Call for papers for the "Regional Conference: Applying WEAP as a Decision Support System for IWRM", May 25-27, 2009 Damascus, SYRIA

ACSAD and BGR have been jointly working in various cooperation projects since more than two decades. The project "Management, Protection and Sustainable Use of Groundwater and Soil Resources" has been launched in April 1999.
After developing and testing a user-friendly, efficient, inexpensive and easily sharable instrument for water
management (Decision Support System, DSS) in the previous phase, the main objective of Phase IV (08/2008 - 07/2011) is to distribute it with regard to a more integrated water resources management among the countries and the respective institutions of the Arab region.
The application of a DSS for Soil and Groundwater Management will give decision makers the necessary insight into the current status and possible scenarios of the future development (e.g. population growth, climate change). Through visualizing and discussing the current status and future scenarios with the relevant stakeholders, jointly decided and accepted water shares can be fixed. This will reduce the conflict between concurrent water-users and will lead to a sustainable management of limited water resources for the current and future hydrologic years A report on the DSS-application of 2 pilot studies:

• Zabadani Basin, SYRIA
• Berrechid Basin, MOROCCO

as well as other documentations (report on vulnerability mapping of the Zabadani Basin, DSShelper tools and Tutorial materials) can be downloaded from www.acsad-bgr.org.

Water Resources are very scarce in the Arab region. Recent climate change models predict for the future years even more severe conditions, due to increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation.
Therefore it is important that water resources are managed carefully in a sustainable way following the IWRM concept. This is a very difficult task and reliable tools are needed to support the management and planning.
In most countries of the region the key problem is the limited knowledge of the hydrological system and thus the water resources are not well evaluated. The impact of the limited knowledge and management of the resources is often overexploitation and water quality deterioration.

ACSAD, BGR and SEI have jointly improved and applied such an IWRM-tool by combining WEAP www.weap21.org and MODFLOW2000 water.usgs.gov/nrp/gwsoftware/modflow.html. Various other institutions, researchers and projects have been applying WEAP as a Water Management and Planning tool in the region and beyond.

The aim of the conference is to share this information between all interested people in the region and to start a user network to improve jointly the IWRM by applying and sharing powerful support tools like WEAP and respective experiences.

The organizers are encouraging people from the region and beyond to present their case studies at the conference. Presentations will be 25 minutes, followed by 5 minutes discussion. The full papers need to be send in by 01.04.2009. Depending on the acceptance of the paper the organizers can sponsor the respective presenter by refunding travel and accommodation costs. 

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Deadline for Papers: 01.04.2009.

Conference Topics are: WEAP applications in the field of water planning, transboundary water policy, climate change studies, socioeconomic studies, river ecosystems, water utilities, water rights administration, water quality, safe yield analysis, multicriteria decision analysis, optimization modelling, groundwater recharge modelling, irrigation demand and supply modelling, groundwater flow model integration, reservoir management.