Final Conference

KINDRA Project Final Conference

Over the past 3 years, the EU-funded KINDRA project worked on gathering and standardising groundwater knowledge and research across Europe. Work started with the EU-wide assessment of existing groundwater-related practical and scientific knowledge based on a new Hydrogeological Research Classification System (HRC-SYS), created by the project team. This classification is supported a web-service – the European Inventory of Groundwater Research (EIGR), which acts not only as a knowledge repository but also as a tool that helped identify relevant research topics, existing research trends and critical research challenges.

The project concluded with a final conference organised in Brussels on the 27^th of February 2018, hosted in the Académie Royale de Bruxelles. During the conference, the consortium presented the three major outcomes of KINDRA and gathered feedback for the afterlife of the EU funded period.

The sessions with the titles “Opening Session”, “Kindra Outcomes”, “Kindra Inventory Potential Users” and “Future Opportunities” were chaired by members of Kindra’s Joint Panel of Experts and the very successful “Closing Session” was chaired by Philippe Quevauviller, Policy and Research Programming Officer at European Commission. Seventeen speakers presented their views and suggestions for the future of the EIGR and its potential users. Several members of the European Commission, as well as EASME, the International Association of Hydrogeologists and many more important stakeholders in science, research and industry were present and actively involved in Q&A and debates throughout the closing Panel Discussion.

KINDRA was run for three years by a consortium of nine partners, twenty linked third parties and ten members of the Joint Panel of Experts, making a total of twenty EU-countries collaborating.

The KINDRA team would like to publicly thank all those involved in the success of this project.

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“It was an exciting experience to coordinate the KINDRA project, thanks to the active collaboration
of the project partners, of the Joint Panel of Experts and of the EC staff.
During last three years, I realized that groundwater is not only a relevant research topic and a
fundamental resource for humans and the environment, but that also its relationships with actual
societal challenges and EC policies are so important and need to be reinforced, more than I
suspected at the beginning of the project.
I hope that KINDRA realized some steps forward in pushing groundwater issues on the European agenda.
All of us did our best during the project, but additional efforts are required for the future to foster KINDRA’s long-term impact on groundwater policies.
We are ready to perform them and are confident that other stakeholders will support us.”