Harmonised Principles for Public Participation in Quality Assurance of Integrated Water Resources Modelling

The main purpose of public participation in integrated water resources modelling is to improve decision-making by ensuring that decisions are soundly based on shared knowledge, experience and scientific evidence. The present paper describes stakeholder involvement in the modelling process. The point of departure is the guidelines for quality assurance for `scientific` water resources modelling developed under the EU research project HarmoniQuA, which has developed a computer based Modelling Support Tool (MoST) to provide a user-friendly guidance and a quality assurance framework that aim for enhancing the credibility of river basin modelling. MoST prescribes interaction, which is a form of participation above consultation but below engagement of stakeholders and the public in the early phases of the modelling cycle and under review tasks throughout the process. MoST is a flexible tool which supports different types of users and facilitates interaction between modeller, manager and stakeholders. The perspective of using MoST for engagement of stakeholders e.g. higher level participation throughout the modelling process as part of integrated water resource management is evaluate

Quality Assurance of the modelling process

The present paper briefly describes a new modelling support tool (MoST) aimed at facilitating better quality assurance of the modelling process. MoST comprises a Knowledge Base with guidelines on good modelling practise for seven scientific domains. It supports multi-domain modelling and working in teams of different user types (water managers, modellers, auditors/reviewers, stakeholders and members of the public). The key functionality of MoST is to: (a) Guide to ensure that a model has been properly applied; (b) Monitor to record decisions, methods and data used in the modelling work and in this way enable transparency and reproducibility of the modelling process; (c) Report to provide suitable reports on what has been done by the various actors. MoST has been developed under the HarmoniQuA project (www.HarmoniQuA.org