Sustainable water use
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The European Commission upholds the need to guarantee the protection of emblematic habitats depending on water. Therefore, actions should be taken to ensure that conservation of these habitats and species directly depending on water is achieved.
In this sense, the framework for Community action in the field of water policy establish the cooperation between Member States in order to meet the requirements of the river basin districts that cover more than one Member State’s territory.
There are 4 international river basin districts shared between Spain and Portugal:
Minho-Sil, Douro, Tagus and Guadiana.
The Albufeira Project aims at improving the coordination of actions to promote and protect the good status of these bodies of water shared between Spain and Portugal, and to achieve its sustainable use
It is why it searches the harmonisation of methodologies to evaluate the status or the ecological potential of shared bodies of water and the definition of measures needed to reach the established environmental objectives for bodies of water.
It also considers the improvement of management of protected areas linked to these bodies of water, through methodologies that integrate the WFD’s requirements and those of the Natura 2000 Network. This enhances the coordinated protection of the valuable species and habitats living in these shared bodies of water.
Albufeira was created at the 3rd Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Cooperation for the Protection and Sustainable Use of Waters of the Spanish-Portuguese River Basins (from this point forward, the Albufeira Convention), on 30 November 1998, to face the challenge of managing shared bodies of water and to meet the needs detected by the European Commission when monitoring the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Albufeira therefore contributes to the strategies for sustainable management of water resources and works on the third cycle of hydrological planning.
A way to make Europe
Co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
through the Interreg VA Spain-Portugal Programme (POCTEP) 2014-2020
