14. January 2022, Topic: Aquatic Ecotoxicology Sediment Ecotoxicology Risk Assessment

Ecotox Centre webinar with Dr. Jos Brils, January 18, 16:00 - 17:00

The Ecotox Centre would like to invite you to a webinar with Dr Jos Brils (Deltares, NL) on "Sediment management from a WFD perspective" on 18 January at 16:00.

Zoom
(Passcode: 423742)

Jos Brils is a member of the SedNet Steering Group and a delegate in the Strategic Coordination Group (SCG) for the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) of the Water Framework Directive and in the Zero Pollution Stakeholder Platform. He therefore has very good insight into the development of the role of sediment management under the Water Framework Directive.

Abstract: Sediment is a key component of aquatic ecosystems and acts as a host for all categories of aquatic species. Addressing sediment-related pressures is therefore a pre-requisite to the protection and enhancement of aquatic ecosystems and, consequently, to the achievement of good status for the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Many substances (organics, metals, nutrients) can accumulate in sediment over time and be released again into water and cam therefore negatively affect the ecological or chemical status of surface waters. Furthermore, flood events as well as human interventions – such as de-damming – can remobilize deposited sediment and thus result in down-stream, and cross-border transport of sediment-associated contamination.

Building on an evaluation of the WFD (Fitness Check) and on lessons learnt after two cycles of implementation, the importance of properly managing sediment to reach the environmen-tal objectives of the WFD has been now well recognised. Therefore, the EU Water Directors agreed to include this topic in the WFD Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) work pro-gram for 2019-2021. In April 2019, a workshop of the CIS workgroup Ecological Status (ECOSTAT) concluded to the need to develop a CIS document to share a common under-standing and good practices on the management of sediment in the context of the WFD. A group of around 50 sediment experts from all over Europe were nominated to draft this doc-ument. The document provides a broad overview of the knowledge on sediment and its management in the context of WFD with many practical examples on methods and measures.

About Jos Brils: Jos Brils is working as a senior adviser with Deltares (www.deltares.nl) in the area of sus-tainable natural resources management with a specific focus on sediment. He initiated and successfully coordinated two soil/sediment/water system management related, EC funded projects: the FP5 Thematic Network project SedNet - that continued as self-supporting European Sediment Network (www.sednet.org)- and the FP6 Coordination Action project RISKBASE on risk-informed management of European river basins (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-38598-8 ).

As NL contact point Jos is heavily engaged in the construction of DANUBIUS-RI: the pan-European distributed research infrastructure dedicated to interdisciplinary studies of river–sea systems (http://www.danubius-ri.eu/). For SedNet Jos is the delegate in the WFD Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) Strategic Coordination Group (SCG) as well as in the Zero Pollution Stakeholder Platform. Jos co-organized the WFD ECOSTAT (ecological status) sediment management workshop (1-2 April 2019, Dubrovnik). He is member of the core group in charge of the drafting of the WFD CIS sediment document and co-lead of the ‘Sediment contamination’ chapter of that document.