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During the Büyük Menderes River Basin planning project in Turkey, Deltares collaborated with local experts to develop a tool for supporting the rapid assessment of measures and strategies to help achieve compliance with the EU’s Water Framework Directive. Separate hydrology and ecology working groups were set up that included representatives from Turkish universities, ministries, monitoring departments and water institutes. The developed tool consisted of two modelling suites, RIBASIM and WFDExplorer, and modelled basin hydrology, water distribution, water quality and ecology processes. It was used together with a wider group of regional stakeholders to assess the efficacy of various restoration and mitigation measures. Stakeholders could assess potential measures against a set of the agreed key performance indicators, and were familiarised with the use of the tool via a gaming approach. Having been built with the knowledge of local experts, stakeholder trust in the developed tool was high and stakeholders viewed it as a useful support for informed decision making
Figure 1: Collaborative modelling is situated within an improved policy analysis framework, here for Urban Climate Adaptation planning.