A study mission of the International Sava River Basin Commission (ISRBC) will be held from 7 to 9 November 2018 in Croatia, and will focus on two main themes, namely the institutional and legal aspects of a basin organization and the exchange of experience and good practice, as well as capacity building in the field of Basin management.
OSS participation will consist to share its experience in the field of transboundary water management, in particular the consultation mechanism of the North-Western Sahara Aquifer System (SASS), shared by Algeria, Libya and Tunisia, which is one of the few existing groundwater management mechanisms in the world.
Created at the technical level in 2010, the SASS * consultation mechanism evolved to a political level in 2008, with a technical unit based at the OSS, led by a rotating coordination. Internationally recognized, this mechanism is in the process of being replicated. The objective is to progressively develop the same mechanisms for other aquifers (eg the Iullemeden Aquifer System - Taoudeni- Tanezrouft (Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso , Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Nigeria).
The establishment of consultation mechanisms follows a common approach:
• Construction of common, shared and regularly updated databases
• Development of hydrogeological models and models of simulations of the impacts of samplings
• Development of cartographic servers
• Capacity building of the countries concerned and awareness of the sharing of common wealth.
* The North-Western Aquifer System (SASS) covers an area of 1 million km2. It is an immense reservoir of water essential to the development of the region, both for domestic and agricultural needs. However, the aquifer has been subject for the few last decades to overexploitation (water abstraction increased from 500 million m3 per year in 1950 to more than 3 billion m3 per year today), in addition to the degradation of water quality and the significant decline in the aquifer level.