DICAM: European recognition of “good practice” in water resource management in Albania
DICAM's international cooperation activities have received important international recognition as good practice in water resource management.
As part of the “NaturAlbania” project, funded by AICS - Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (2020 - 2023), the DICAM research team studied the feasibility, designed and tested, coordinated and implemented the installation of a hydrometric station for the remote and continuous acquisition and transmission of hydrometric level and flow data for the Vjosa River in Albania. In recent years, the Vjosa has come to international prominence as “Europe's last wild river”, recently recognised as the continent's first National River Park.
DICAM initiative, called HydroVjosa, has been recognised as a ‘good practice’ at the European level for sustainable water resource management within the INTERREG Europe project ‘RIWET, Public-Private Governance of Rivers and Wetlands Restoration and Conservation as Blue-Green Infrastructure’. HydroVjosa is currently the only hydrometric measuring station in Albania with quantitative data transmitted continuously and freely accessible to the public on the web.
Water resource management in rapidly evolving socio-economic contexts, such as Albania, is often limited by the difficulty of obtaining quantitative data, partially due to the difficulty of ensuring the operation of monitoring stations beyond the duration of the individual projects in which they are installed. Pilot projects such as HydroVjosa can therefore provide examples that can be replicated and extended on a larger scale by the relevant public technical services. The system’s freely available data support a wide range of scientific, educational, and management purposes, fostering a culture of transparency and shared stewardship of water resources, needed in the EU alignment process of Albania.
A crucial factor in the success of the initiative was the partnership between universities (the University of Trento, the University of Genoa and the Polytechnic University of Tirana), local authorities (Municipality of Permet) and civil society organisations (CESVI), which made it possible to combine the necessary technical expertise with knowledge of the local context, while at the same time developing a common awareness of the value of the data acquired by the station and therefore of the limited but essential actions necessary to ensure its operation.
HydroVjosa is part of the activities of the UNESCO Chair in Engineering for Human and Sustainable Development, which proposes teaching, research and “third mission” university activities focused on the relationship between engineering knowledge and methods, particularly environmental engineering, and the dynamics of local contexts. The creation of HydroVjosa was part of the PhD research of Marta Crivellaro, currently a post-doctoral researcher at DICAM, supervised by Guido Zolezzi, with the involvement of CISMA srl, an innovative company in the field of environmental engineering.
The best practice was presented with the RIWET project partners on 5 November 2025, attended by all those involved.
