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Development of national pathways

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Development of national pathways

By Tiia Pedusaar and Kaja Peterson, SEI Tallinn; Staffan Lund, SLU

Waterdrive workplan includes development of national strategies for improved water management. However, due to the complexity and variable conditions in the different countries we will make changes and instead of national strategies develop more focused “National Pathways”. A National Pathway is a road map for a selected priority issue or bottleneck that needs to be addressed to go further. The time perspective is 2021 -2030. The Pathways will vary in the different countries and start from what is seen as a priority issues by each national team. Each pathway description will be short (about five pages) and include an objective, a rationale for the selection, a SWOT analysis and an implementation plan for the period 2021-2030 as well as a visualization. The “National Pathways” will be available in draft versions by June 2021 and final versions by December 2021. There will be an ongoing dialogue with concerned stakeholders in the process. The Pathways will primarily be used to guide further work on national levels. It remains to be seen how they can support the Waterdrive recommendations on the international level. If you would like to join the dialogue, you are most welcome to contact your Waterdrive national team.

The work with the Pathways has just started. Eight partners (Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Denmark and Russia) talked about the progress in developing the national pathways at the partners’ meeting. The three most frequently mentioned categories were: effective financing mechanisms, new services with the help of catchment officer or water advisor and effective digital decision support for farmers.

Pathways identified by partners are summarized in table.

Sirkka Tattari from SYKE was kindly willing to reflect the reports of the partners. The general impression was that the proposed pathways are very comprehensive. Sirkka Tattari expressed her full agreement with project manager Staffan Lund that in this process we learn, support and inspire each other.

Here are some of her reflections which could be linked to the three most frequently mentioned categories:

  • As a result of the implementation of the water protection measure (e.g., buffer zones, constructed wetlands), part of the land will be decommissioned. This must be compensated to farmers.
  • There is no systematic collection of implemented measures. Looking at catchment level maps, agricultural areas are often close to rivers and ditches. How about to plant forest between water course and the field? We still need to consider which measures are suitable for what purposes.
  • Farmers know their fields well, but they do not know how their farm is integrated on the whole catchment area. There is need to connect RBMP and local spatial planning, and advice farmers to get a `bigger picture´.
  • More of data visualization and use of remote sensing data are crucial to attract the interest of farmers for collaboration as well as for effective local spatial planning.