Workshop n°2 - Western Region

Agenda of the 2^nd Western Regional Workshop

Co-organised by  Actéon & AMEC
Funded by EC
Regional workshop
 Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRM): How can catchment management be adapted to widen the potential for NWRMs?
 Strasbourg, July 1^st-2^nd 2014
ENGEES – Ecole Nationale du Génie de l’Eau et de l’Environnement de Strasbourg
1 Quai Koch, Strasbourg

 Programme concept

 Background

NWRMs provide multiple benefits, which go well beyond water retention itself and include, for example, water quality improvement, biodiversity improvement, enhancement of soil features, and better ecosystem adaptation capacity to climate change and so on. In addition, NWRMs are multi-dimensional, as they include both interventions on rivers but also on floodplains and riparian areas throughout a catchment.

As highlighted during the first round of Regional Workshops, these features of NWRMs call for a catchment-based, multidimensional approach, which goes beyond water and flood management and embraces biodiversity/habitat management and climate change adaptation strategies. At the policy level, this implies that the links between NWRM implementation and all relevant EU Directives need to be strengthened.

At present, NWRMs are directly linked to the implementation of the Flood Directive, and in a very few cases was the Water Framework Directive the main driver for implementation. This Directive, in fact, does not give much direct attention to riparian issues, but rather focuses on the water body as a central concept, and this might be hindering a good approach to NWRMs. Overall, an explicit link with the WFD needs to be made. Furthermore, the multi-dimensional character of NWRMs also calls for a full integration not only of FD and WFD, but also of the Bird and the Habitat Directives and other relevant Directives, and this suggests that a more complex approach would be needed. An integration of all relevant EU Directives could also help addressing current institutional challenges.

 Main focus of the 2^nd Western Workshop

To address this challenge, the second Western Regional Workshop in the frame of the NWRM initiative will be dedicated to discussions on how to adapt catchment management for widening the potential of NWRMs. The main discussion topics will include:

• Current policy and planning frameworks for NWRM implementation;
• Existing links between NWRM implementation and the WFD;
• Experiences with NWRMs implementation in biodiversity management and climate change adaptation;
• Financing: current financing frameworks; opportunities and challenges for diversifying financing sources in an integrated catchment-wide perspective;
• Integrated (interconnected) planning at the catchment level: opportunities and challenges for strengthening integration;
• Opportunities and challenges for strengthening the links between NWRM implementation and implementation of the relevant EU Directives (WFD, FD, Habitats/Bird Directives, Climate Change Adaptation Strategy).

 Format

The workshop will be highly interactive, and structured around presentations, round table discussions and group sessions to work on specific case studies. A site visit, which at the moment is still under definition and thus not included in the agenda, might be added to the programme later on; in this case, it will be scheduled in the morning of the first day.

Translation from and to French (and possibly German) will be provided during all sessions.

 Participants

The workshop will host around 40 participants, excluding attendees from the NWRM consortium.

Based on the proposed main theme, the workshop will target in preference water catchment managers from the different countries. 

However, to ensure that different perspectives and fields of expertise are well represented in discussions and group working session, other policy makers and stakeholders will also be invited, namely:

• Other national and local policy makers/ planners involved in flood protection or biodiversity management
• NGos involved in catchment management
• Organisations involved in the management of large scale Habitats/Natura 2000
• People dealing with climate change adaptation at regional/river basin district scale
• It can still be good to have few practitioners involved
• Some MS representatives from the WG PoM?