Background

Arda River is a cross border river, that springs in Bulgaria and continues into Greece. The river is generating the most hazardous floods in the southeast Balkans, which are propagating downstream to Maritza/Evros causing serious losses at the BG-GR CBC region. The project is implemented in the cross-border region between Bulgaria and Greece and is devoted to the creation of a flood warning system. Thus the project will support the implementation of flood mitigation measures and reduce the adverse consequences of flood events for human health, environment, cultural heritage and economic activity in cross-border area.

Objectives

• to promote cross border cooperation in the field of flood prevention, the establishment and running of reliable flood forecasting tools and reservoir operation scenarios for accurate and timely flood forecasts with sufficient lead time, effective dissemination of flood forecast information and warning messages to the end users,
• development of alarm procedures and information campaigns, awareness-raising, training and learning in cooperation with the local administration and population, installation of additional gauging stations and associated real-time data transmission equipment in cross border region for co-operation in the field of sustainable flood risk management and flood protection.

Partnership

Building the consortium, two type of partners are selected: research and development with certain capacity in flood modelling and forecasting (NIMH BG and DUTH GR) and water management and flood prevention authorities (EARBD BG and RDF-EMTHR GR).

Activities

The activities of the project will be located in the chosen CBC region.The main activities are:

• study of historical floods,
• study of flood formation factors,
• definition of sensitive areas vulnerable to floods where more detailed information on the river bed and floodplains will be collected,
• organizing the real time data flows,
• preparing and calibrating the runoff forecasting model,
• study reservoirs influence on the flood flows and a range of scenarios on their use will be created,
• building hydraulic model for each selected sensitive areas,
• dissemination of the results, awareness of the public, workshops for the decision makers and stake-holders, training of the decision makers.

Expected outputs

The main expected outputs are:

• establishment of hydro meteorological information system,
• development of GIS database,
• improvement of the density and frequency of the hydro-meteorological observation network through
• installing additional automatic stations,
• flood warning system operation manual,
• set of hot points,
• set of alert threshold for each hot points,
• set of warning procedures,
• WEB based tools for information exchange and access of decision makers, stakeholders and large public to all the necessary data and forecasts.

Project Budget

This project funded in the framework of the European Territorial Cooperation (ETC) Programme “Greece Bulgaria 2007-20131”, is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the national funds of the participating countries.

Total Budget

Source of Funding	Budget
ERDF	699,737.43 €
National co-financing	123,483.08 €
Total Budget	823,220.50 €

Budget Per Partner

Project Partner No	Country	ERDF (1)	%	National Co-financing (2)	%	Total (3)=(1)+(2)
LP (P1)	BULGARIA	319,978.25 €	85	56,466.75 €	15	376,445.00 €
P2	BULGARIA	78,489.00 €	85	13,851.00 €	15	92,340.00 €
P3	GREECE	173,065.89 €	85	30,541.04 €	15	203,606.93 €
P4	GREECE	128,204.28 €	85	22,624.29 €	15	150,828.57 €
TOTALS		699,737.43 €	85	123,483.08 €	15	823,220.50 €

Budget & Partners per Country

Country	Number of partners	ERDF	National Co-Financing	Total
GREECE	2	301,270.18 €	53,165.33 €	354,435.50 €
BULGARIA	2	398,467.25 €	70,317.75 €	468,785.00 €
TOTALS	4	699,737.43 €	123,483.08 €	823,220.50 €

Budget per WP

Work Package No	Budget
WP1	46,132.00 €
WP2	58,857.50 €
WP3	406,811.60 €
WP4	103,695.70 €
WP5	118,906.93 €
WP6	88,816.77 €
TOTAL	823,220.50 €