Water Accounts and Water Stress Indexes in the European Context of Water Planning: The Jucar River Basin

Abstract

Abstract Currently, water accounts are one of the next steps to be implemented in European River Basin Management Plans. One of the major handicaps lies on computing water resources availability as it depends on several factors, some of which are difficult to quantify. Building water accounts is a complex task, mainly due to the lack of common European definitions and procedures for calculating water availability. For their development, when data is not systematically measured, simulation models and estimations are necessary. The main idea of this paper is to obtain a general scheme to quantify water availability in a river basin and apply it in the European context of water planning. The Jucar River Basin, located in the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain, has been taken as a study case. Overall, as the European Union consists of countries with different hydrology, emulating the hydrological cycle may not always be enough. Consequently, a possible procedure would be to incorporate all the elements necessary for determining water accounts within the hydrological models, or within water resources management models, or an intermediate solution.