Citizens and scientists discuss water management challenges in Tordera
December 12th in the afternoon, at the Domus Sent Soví in Hostalric BeWater held a new workshop.
This session applied an innovative methodology proposed by this European project, which is also implemented in other 3 different Mediterranean countries: Slovenia, Cyprus and Tunisia. BeWater project uses an iterative process for mutual learning in order to guarantee that local actors have an active role in the definition of suitable strategies for river basin management.
The objective of this meeting was to promote dialogue and collaboration between science and society in order to face global change in the Mediterranean, and specifically, in the River Tordera. In this occasion, participants worked together to develop a cartography of main challenges water management will have to face due to the impacts of global change.
Challenges included in this cartography were:
- Lack of environmental flows
- Groundwater overexploitation and salt intrusion
- Recovery of good forest management
- Funding for correct water management
In the same line, participants analyzed the interrelation between different challenges, contributing to generate an integrated view of the most important issues to tackle.
"BeWater is a Project which aims building a process towards adaptation to global change based on contribution s from the basin's society " says Anabel Sanchez in her introduction to the workshop.
"We are talking about challenges, but we also should speak about numbers". Participants have remarked the importance of accessing all relevant information on who uses the water, how and why; given that we can't manage future changes if we don't know what happens in our basins today.
"We have to better protect what we already have" was another strong statement revealed in the workshop. The Tordera River indeed has many high value natural areas which are currently not sufficiently protected.
Workshop conclusions have opened a new way to further engage citizen, as was explained in the last presentation, introducing main aspects to take into account in the future and inviting to open a debate in different areas of the basin.