SALT – Sustainable mAnagement of the Esino river basin to prevent saline intrusion in the coastal aquifer in consideration of climaTe change
SALT overall objective is to contribute to the efficient use and protection from saltwater intrusion of groundwater resources in the lower Esino river valley. The objective corresponds to European Union policy aimed to encourage resource efficiency through more sustainable consumption patterns of water resources. Specifically, the project aims to:
- Analyse the trend of salt intrusion in the Esino River and related aquifer;
- Simulate salt intrusion under future scenario considering climate change (impact analysys);
- Define remediation actions to prevent salt intrusion increasing;
- Develope a tool which can be used to evaluate the impact of different management options on the quality and quantity of the aquifer;
- Disseminate and contribute to reproduction of proposed methodology to other costal aquifers in Marches Region and other regions in Italy and the EC.
With this objectives, SALT links with two European directives, namely Water Framework Directive and Groundwater Directive.
The activities of the unit are in the Action 6, Development and application of a Regional Risk Assessment procedure to support the aquifer management. The Action aims at developing a spatially-resolved risk assessment procedure, supporting the assessment of actual and future climatic scenarios for the Esino river basin, and thus providing a tool which can be used to evaluate the impact of different management options on the quality and quantity of the groundwater. The developed procedure will integrate vulnerability, impact and risk indicator and indices, as well as the climate and hydrogeological models results at analytical unit scale, to rank the risk for groundwater for the selected scenarios. In order to achieve this goal, the activity includes three tasks:
- the methodological development,
- the scenario construction,
- the regional risk assessment procedure development and application.
Each task will provide the input for the subsequent activity: the methodological development will identify the indicators which can be used to characterize the present and future scenarios. Finally, potential impacts to groundwater will be estimated for each scenario, allowing also the ranking of the analytical units identified in the Esino river basin.
Link: http://www.lifesalt.it