NEA has recently started to work on the ECCONET (Effects of Climate Change on the inland waterway NETwork) project, funded by the European Commission (DG TREN). ECCONET is a three-year project with the aim to assess the effects of climate change on the inland waterway network and to develop adaptation strategies. NEA is part of a diverse and interesting consortium of 10 partners, under coordination of Transport and Mobility Leuven. The project builds on past and ongoing research in meteorology, hydrology, infrastructure operation, ship-building, transportation, and economics to assess the various effects of climate change on navigation conditions and to analyse adaptation measures to decrease the sensitivity of inland waterway transport to climate change.

The main results expected from the ECCONET project are an impact analysis related to the climate change and a strategic framework, bundling concrete adaptation measures and policy guidelines, for a continued development of the inland waterway transport mode. ECCONET will cooperate and coordinate its activities with similar FP7 projects such as EWENT and WEATHER (NEA is also involved in this latter project). Also, targeted input will be provided to the development plan for EU inland waterway infrastructure within the PLATINA project. The first intermediate project results of ECCONET will be available in the beginning of 2011. These are related to the area of study and the choice of representative climate scenarios.

NEA is involved in 4 of the 6 workpackages. We coordinate the work in workpackage 3 where the effects of climate change and adaptation strategies on the transport network are assessed. We use a transport model to determine future transport effects taking into account climate changes, economic developments and transport infrastructure changes. Outcomes of this workpackage are input to further work on the economic evaluation of the adaptation strategies and the derivation of policy recommendations.

Information
For more information we refer to the project website: http://www.tmleuven.be/project/ecconet/home.htm.

It is also possible to contact either Martin Quispel (mqu@nea.nl) or Barry Ubbels (bub@nea.nl).