A team made up of technical experts from the partners of the LIFE Ebro Resilience P1 project—the Government of La Rioja, OREKAN-Environmental Management of Navarre, the Aragonese Water Institute, the Ebro River Basin Authority, and the TRAGSA Group— has made a working visit to Austria to observe firsthand the activities of the LIFE IP IRIS project, which focuses on river restoration and improving flood protection in several river basins across the country.
The Spanish delegation visited four project sites of the IRIS project, all of which are associated with rivers and located in different regions of Austria:
- The Enns River in Mandling (municipality of Schladming, Styria) and the Enns River in Stainach (Styria), featuring renaturalization and flood protection measures.
- The Danube River in Marktau (Upper Austria), where a secondary branch of the river has been reopened to expand the riverine habitat.
- The Pielach River in Obergrafendorf (Lower Austria). In this section near where it flows into the Danube, efforts are underway to widen the river channel.
In these areas, IRIS is implementing measures aimed at restoring space to rivers, improving their habitats, and reducing the effects of flooding—lines of work it shares with LIFE Ebro Resilience P1. In addition, the Austrian project aims to make rivers more resilient to extreme events such as droughts, heat waves, and low water flows.
Their work is based on the GE-RM approach, a planning model that coordinates all the agencies involved in a watershed—environment, water, agriculture, land use planning, energy, and municipalities—so that decisions regarding rivers are made jointly, coherently, and with a long-term vision. In practice, this means planning for the river as a complete system: where it can reclaim space, where protection needs to be strengthened, which habitats should be restored, and how all of this can be reconciled with land uses.
This visit continues the cooperation that began in May, when the team from the Austrian LIFE IRIS project traveled to Spain to learn about the actions of LIFE Ebro Resilience P1 in the middle section of the Ebro.
They were then able to visit the Lateral Flow Buffer Zones (ZAFL), a pilot project linking floodplains in an area of intensive agriculture being implemented along the Osera de Ebro–Fuentes de Ebro section (Zaragoza). They also learned about the initiatives in the Combined Action Section between Alfaro (La Rioja) and Castejón (Navarra), a series of natural water retention measures designed to adapt the section to flood risk, thereby reducing the impacts (restoration of riverine space, creation of relief channels, or reopening of former river branches).
The exchange between the two projects allows for comparing methodologies, sharing lessons learned, and strengthening coordination among European administrations working on common challenges: rivers that are safer, more vibrant, and better prepared for an increasingly extreme climate. Both IRIS and Ebro Resilience share a central goal: to move toward river management that combines flood protection, ecological restoration, and improved territorial resilience.
LIFE Program
The LIFE Ebro Resilience P1 Project, which receives financial support from the European Commission’s LIFE Program, is an innovative initiative to address the issue of flooding in the middle reaches of the Ebro River, with a clear objective: to ensure that the population and economic activities coexist with an Ebro River in a good state of conservation, while reducing the damage associated with floods that are part of the river’s natural dynamics.
The project is led by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), through the Ebro River Basin Authority (CHE), in collaboration with the public companies TRAGSA and TRAGSATEC, the Government of La Rioja, the Government of Navarre, through Orekan-Gestión Ambiental de Navarra, the Government of Aragon, and the Aragonese Water Institute.