Spain's Duero River Basin Authority — statutory water management body and NBS demonstration partner with basin-scale monitoring infrastructure.
The Confederación Hidrográfica del Duero is Spain's statutory river basin authority for the Duero watershed — one of the largest river systems in the Iberian Peninsula — holding direct regulatory jurisdiction over water resource planning, flood protection, ecological status, and permit issuance across the basin. As a public management body, they operate and monitor real rivers, wetlands, and floodplains on a permanent basis, giving them something most research partners lack: sovereign, long-term access to large-scale natural water infrastructure. In EU projects, they function as an institutional anchor — providing demonstration sites with regulatory legitimacy, long-term monitoring capacity, and the kind of stakeholder authority that turns research pilots into policy-ready solutions. Their H2020 work sits at the intersection of water governance and nature-based solutions, where they contribute both the territory and the institutional mandate to test and validate approaches at river-basin scale.
As Spain's statutory Duero basin authority, water governance is their core institutional function, providing the regulatory and operational foundation for both NAIAD and URBAN GreenUP.
Coordinated NAIAD (nature insurance value assessment and demonstration) and participated in URBAN GreenUP (NBS for re-naturing cities), covering NBS across both river and urban contexts.
NAIAD explicitly addressed the insurance value of nature — quantifying how natural ecosystems reduce flood and climate risk — where the Duero basin provided the test territory.
URBAN GreenUP introduced an urban dimension — renaturing cities, NBS monitoring, and up-scaling — extending their expertise beyond river management into urban water-green systems.
URBAN GreenUP keywords explicitly include market deployment, global market and international cooperation, and replicability and transferability — applied-market aspects new to their portfolio.
Their H2020 journey began with NAIAD (2016–2020), where they took the coordinator role in a project focused on assessing and demonstrating the insurance value of nature — a research-heavy exercise in quantifying ecosystem risk-reduction benefits at river-basin scale. By the time URBAN GreenUP ran through 2023, the emphasis had shifted sharply toward deployment: the project's keywords foreground market deployment, replicability and transferability, up-scaling, and even global market and international cooperation — language that signals a move from valuation to commercialization. The trajectory over their two projects runs clearly from academic demonstration toward market-ready, replicable NBS products aimed at international scaling.
They are moving from foundational ecosystem services research toward replicable, market-deployable nature-based solutions for urban and river contexts — a profile increasingly relevant to Green Deal implementation projects.
They have demonstrated both leadership (coordinating NAIAD) and partnership (participating in URBAN GreenUP), which is unusual for a public regulatory body and signals genuine project management capacity. With 48 unique partners across 16 countries drawn from just two projects, they consistently operate in large, internationally diverse consortia — the kind typical of H2020 Innovation Actions and large-scale demonstration projects. In practice, they are sought for what they uniquely control: regulatory jurisdiction and physical access to a major European river basin, making them a credibility anchor rather than a pure research contributor.
With 48 unique consortium partners across 16 countries generated by only two projects, their network is unusually broad for an organization of this size, reflecting the large multi-national consortia typical of NBS demonstration projects. Their reach is pan-European, consistent with their role as an institutional reference site for water and green infrastructure policy.
No university or research institute can replicate what they bring: statutory regulatory authority over one of Iberia's largest river basins, with permanent operational infrastructure and legally mandated long-term monitoring. For consortia that need a real, large-scale demonstration site for water-related or nature-based solutions — one that will still be running 10 years after the project ends — they are one of a small number of European river basin authorities active in H2020. This institutional permanence, combined with proven willingness to lead as well as partner, makes them a low-risk, high-legitimacy choice for projects requiring water governance credibility.
