Transboundary collaboration on a Global Change Atlas of water resources, agriculture and renewable energies in the Danube Region M. MUERTH 1 , D. DOGARU 2 , M. SIMA 2 , D. BALTEANU 2 & W. MAUSER 1 1 Department of Geography, LMU Munich, Germany 2 Institute of Geography, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania Corresponding Author: M. Muerth, Dept. of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Luisenstrasse 37, 80333 Munich, Germany, e-mail: m.muerth@lmu.de Abstract A newly founded networking project is working on the establishment of a collaborative re- search network to develop a digital Global Change Atlas of the Danube Region (GLOCAD) that will mainly focus on issues relevant to the macro-regional EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR). Therefore, our project aims at the improvement of the cooperation between institu- tions in the region and the exchange of knowledge on land and water management, potential changes in land use, climate as well as ecosystems and their services to society. The network shall develop common methods to monitor, map and model the actual and future state of water resources, agriculture, energy production and ecosystems in the Danube Region, using state-of-the-art remote sensing, simulation models and information technologies. This shall also lead to the assessment of communities’ vulnerability and adaptation potentials to Global Change. Ultimately, common ways to analyze, communicate and disseminate information, from both own research and other sources, via a spatially explicit, digital and integrative plat- form will be developed and applied. 1. Introduction The Danube Region, through its diversity and complexity offers as many possibilities for devel- opment as many challenges. Different patterns of economic development, social contexts, legacies and cultural identities, along with long standing or on the contrary, unstable political and institutional settings have been generating significant regional disparities between the affluent upper and the lower part of the Danube River Basin (DRB). The particularities of the countries in central and eastern part of the DRB are mainly given by the structural changes in economy, social life, politics and institutions, during the transition and post-transition period. Although, these countries share some common pillars of the transi- tion process, (e.g. privatization, institutional reforms, economic sectors restructuring, read- justment of foreign investments, etc.), they did not evolve equally during this process, on the contrary, each being characterized by different development contexts. For instance, in Roma- nia, the industrial restructuring and privatization process and the newly emerging sectors, such as tourism or IT, have imposed new patterns of development. Likewise, Romanian agriculture has undergone different dynamics, passing from highly fragmented family-owned farms, in the first part of the transition period, to larger, commercially-oriented agricultural holdings, alt- hough spatial differences do exist. These types of changes have led to new governance forms of land resources and rural development policies. Under these circumstances, the governance of water resources, land and renewable energies, at regional and national levels needs to be flexible, innovative and robust enough in order to cope with and adapt to external and endogenous drivers of global change and to respond to peoples’ demands for well-being and economic growth. UNEP (2011) has introduced the term of ‘green economy’ to define the necessity to progress toward sustainable development by “improving human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities”. Such a process calls for transformative policies and strategies in the management of natural resources. 2. Main issues The scope of the GLOCAD network is to seed the establishment of integrative research projects to assess pressures and chances driven by Global Change in the Danube Region. Moreover, transdisciplinary research practices will make the core of a deliberate collaborative framework between academia/research institutes and different levels of stakeholders that share interests for resource management and economic and societal development in the DRB. This approach enables the co-design of the research objectives to target societally-relevant questions, fol- lowed by the co-production of knowledge which ultimately forms the solution-oriented an- swers to the societal problems. (Lang et al., 2011; Mauser et al., 2013). To this end, the key research question that steers the discussions within GLOCAD refers to the impacts of Global Change on the availability and use of natural resources and ecosystem services along with the associated societal implications in the DRB. Hence, we focus on building a) a transboundary collaborative research team, b) knowledge production through integrative models, methods and analyses, and c) information communication and dissemination. 2.1 Collaborative research Interdisciplinary research along with an active involvement of stakeholders from regional to local level into the production and development of the knowledge needed is a prerequisite for assuring equitable and sustainable future development trajectories. In this respect, the Danube Region could benefit from a strengthened cooperation among various profile institutions in order to tackle in an integrative way, the key problems of water and land management, chang- es in the ecosystem functions and service, consequences of climate change on society, etc. Increasing the competitiveness of the Danube Region is strongly related to the improvement of the cooperation among countries in many priority areas, such as assuring a viable and sustain- able agriculture, preserving biodiversity, implementing effective water management and governance, reducing pollution and danger from floods, lowering dependency on energy pro- viders from outside the Region, designing sustainable urban development patterns or address- ing demographic change (European Commission, 2010). All these areas could not be addressed from a standalone point of view; they need to be connected with one another through the existent flows at the DRB level (e.g. environmental flows, material flows, mobility of people, etc.). In order to do so, GLOCAD participating members aim at developing sound and reliable development scenarios for the next 50 years by integrating expertise and available methods from different disciplines and countries (Tab. 1). Moreover, addressing the priority areas and plausible futures of the region through scenarios and storylines, and subsequently through management options and intervention strategies, implies a close collaboration with interested groups of stakeholders from the very beginning. Such a condition is particularly necessary to identify key problems that have to be addressed