Think about the city you grew up in, or the one where you are right now – or any main city, really – what do they all have in common? They lay beside a river, and its water has played an essential role in the town’s development and socioeconomical system.
Rivers are tightly connected to a region’s life: they support ecosystems, biodiversity, agricultural practices and provide, through mills before and hydroelectrical power stations now, energy.
River flows are influenced by many factors, and what happens at the beginning of their journey affects water quantity and quality downstream. This often brings up transregional (and sometimes transnational) issues, with water used as a negotiable good and not as a natural one; that’s why project Waterwise looks at this with a cooperative and trans-borders perspective: in the climate crisis era, with increasingly irregular precipitations, and faster and faster melting of the cryosphere (glaciers, snow and permafrost), human-made divisions lost their meaning.
In our project we are studying small headwater catchments in the Alpine area, like River Partnach in Germany or Rio Sadole in Italy; despite their smaller flow, in comparison to rivers downvalley, these catchments play a fundamental role that crosses regions contributing to water quantity and quality of bigger rivers.
Today is the 29th International Day of Action for Rivers and this year’s theme is “Protect Rivers, Protect People”: with our action, we hope that rivers in the near future will not be seen as borders or a tool of deprivation for other populations, but as a thread that connects us all.