The kick-off regular meeting of the Ukrainian team of the EU Horizon Path4Med project

The EU Horizon Path4Med project is to provide high-quality, consistent data on water and soil pollution within the Mediterranean agro-hydro system. The Ukrainian team is a part of this project and is especially responsible for implementing the tasks of the Ukrainian demonstration site DG3(Ukraine) "Future pathways for zero pollution in the Dnipro Basin under emerging challenges and threats", which is a platform for the implementation of innovative approaches to combat soil and water pollution.

According to the scheduled meetings, on 26 March 2025, the NUBiP team had regular monthly meetings. The main purpose of this meeting was to discuss stakeholder mapping and selected stakeholders for involvement in DG3, the D5.3 deliverable template, and the fourth water sampling trip.

Before beginning the meeting, Vita Strokal, Olena Naumovska, and Liudmyla Vagaliuk had an intensive discussion about the datasets of urbanization that relate to the Dnipro River Basin. It is worth mentioning that the proportion of urban and rural pollution in the subbasin of the Dnipro River Basin is different and is based on the percentage of rural and urban areas.

 

This meeting was really fruitful and proactive. At the beginning, Vita Strokal pointed out the information about the poster presentation at the EGU General Assembly, which will be on 30 April 2025. Vita will present the main results of the relationship between climate drivers and agriculture in Ukraine. Also, she added that 5-9 May 2025 will be the ISIMIP workshop, which will be held by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam (Germany). NUBiP is a part of the Water Quality sector, and that’s why we will participate in this workshop.

The second point that Vita emphasized was the progress of the stakeholders' mapping within the Dnipro River Basin. She said that she and Oleksandr Labenko have developed the stakeholder mapping, which includes (1) an explanation of the implementation of the policy strategies addressing water and soil management in the demo site DG3(Ukraine), (2) comparative analyses and categorization of stakeholder engagement into water and soil protection, (3) their roles in implementing innovative technologies and agricultural practices in the Dnipro River Basin.

The third issue that Vita highlighted was the stakeholders who are involved in supporting DG3(Ukraine). She said that we should consider organizing a seminar for this stakeholder group and show them the main results that we have. According to this, she proposed to make a program for the seminar with a questionnaire.

Nonetheless, Olena Naumovska and Maryna Ladyka proposed to start preparing some documents and equipment for soil sampling, which will be in June 2025. They thought that firstly, we need to organize laboratory conditions for conducting physical and chemical soil parameters, and secondly, soil sampling requires having portable devices to measure soil moisture and soil bulk density.

After the discussion during the meeting, we decided that we would do the soil trip between 14 and 22 June 2025, and during that time, we would do the interview with local farms where we take soil samples and who our stakeholders are.

Ievgeniy Berezhniak, Anna Serbenuik and Sergiy Pavliuk presented an overview of soil parameters in Ukraine and highlighted the main issues that contribute to soil pollution and food scarcity.

At the end of the meeting, Vita Strokal proposed steps for the next two months and thanked the team for contributing to this project.