This presentation introduces the Hydropower Sustainability Standard, emphasizing its significance as a global benchmark for assessing and certifying ESG practices in hydropower, particularly within the European Union context. It highlights the Standard’s rigorous certification process, multistakeholder governance, and alignment with international sustainability frameworks. The presentation also showcases HSA’s capacity-building initiatives and specialized training programs designed to support hydropower developers, financiers, governments, and civil society in achieving continuous improvement and compliance with ESG best practices.

Aquatic ecosystems are under pressure from human activities, including deforestation of riparian forests, siltation, and nutrients, leading to the loss of biodiversity worldwide. Three questions will be addressed in this talk:

• How do changes in land use due to human occupation alter water quality, habitat heterogeneity, biodiversity responses, and ecosystem services in hydropower hydrologic units?
• How can reference conditions in headwaters be characterized and protected to conserve water quality and quantity?
• How can social involvement be increased in the conservation of biodiversity, water quality, and ecosystem services in South America?

Thus, we have important knowledge gaps, including:

• What are the taxonomic and functional diversity answers across gradients of environmental conditions?
• How does biodiversity respond to predictions of global change?
• What are the reference conditions (and ecological refuges?)
• How are Citizen Science initiatives practical for the exercise of ecological citizenship and conservation of aquatic biodiversity?

Field samplings, transdisciplinary scientific experiences, schoolteachers and students’ involvement result in a practical Brazilian experience in South America to discuss. In summary, it is urgent to sum academic efforts to electrical companies and government sections provide information, management, protection and conservation of river basins.

Keywords: conservation, aquatic insects, biodiversity.

The European Commission recently published a European strategy setting out a pathway to make Europe water resilient. Our economy, food, energy security (including the hydropower sector), and quality of life rely are all dependent on a sustainable supply and quality of water, and safeguarding our water is crucial for our future. The Water Resilience strategy promotes collaboration across sectors for resilient water systems, with three key objectives:

1) Restoring and protecting the water cycle. The key here is to strengthen the integrated management of water resources by better and more coherent implementation an enforcement of the water related EU legislation – the Water Framework Directive, the Habitats Directive, the Nature Restoration regulation, and the Floods Directive. Nature-based solutions are key measures to increase water retention and resilience within landscapes;

2) Building a water-smart economy together with citizens and economic actors in a way that supports EU competitiveness, is attractive to investors and promotes the EU water industry. Here the focus is on enhancing water efficiency across all sectors, including hydropower;

3) Securing clean and affordable water and sanitation for all and empowering consumers for water resilience. This objective focuses on implementation of the Drinking Water and Urban Wastewater Treatment directives, with increased consumer awareness and water pricing, ensuring that the ‘polluter pays’ principle is applied.

This keynote will address the relevance of the Water Resilience Strategy for the hydropower sector, with emphasis on the need for coherence between River Basin Management Plans, Flood Risk Management Plans and national Nature Restoration Plans, discussing the main bottlenecks and implementation priorities related to hydromorphological pressures and river continuity.