Towards the integrated management of the Danube river – Danube delta – Black Sea system: proposal for a strategic research and innovation agenda

Abstract

The DANCERS project through a combination of stakeholder engagement, review of historical projects and programmes and state of the art science has built upon the EUSDR to develop a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) to focus scientific effort across the entire Danube – Danube Delta – Black Sea (DBS) system. The added value of the implementation of this agenda will be a move towards sustainable development resulting from scientifically grounded and informed decision-based – both integrated across disciplines and the full extent of the DBS system.

The development of the SRIA was achieved using a cross-disciplinary team of scientists who through a series of workshops worked directly with stakeholders from research and education, government and industry to identify their needs and the current opportunities. This was used to inform the scientific research direction to derive current state of the art and this knowledge in conjunction with a review of historical and current research projects and programmes was utilised to effectively shape the SRIA.

The document introduces the issues and challenges involved (Section 1), outlines the approaches used to develop the SRIA (Section 2) and the corresponding results (Section 3) were used to identify twenty one research topics. All of these correlated with at least two or more of the EUSDR Pillars (Connect the Region, Protecting the Environment, Building Prosperity, Strengthening the Region) and are detailed in Section 4. Overall conclusions on the direction of Research and Innovation in the DBS System and the relevance and potential benefits of implementing research under one or all of the suggested SRIA research topics is included in the list on Section 5.