Sectoral activities: Navigation
Strategy
The successful implementation of NbS in freshwater restoration relies heavily on collaboration and coordination across sectors due to their interdependencies and shared reliance on healthy ecosystems. Each Sectoral Strategy highlights key connections with others, emphasizing the need for integrated approaches to overcome challenges and leverage opportunities for transformation.
The Navigation Strategy has focussed on developing ideas with those responsible for managing and maintaining navigational fairways. These ‘waterway managers’ have a remit for integrated water management, and therefore, already engage with, and manage water resources for, a wide range of different economic sectors. Due to this framing, the Strategy does not identify particular cross-sectoral working practices as these are already part of a ‘waterway managers’ remit.
Briefing
Inland navigation for freight and passenger transport can support the EU Green Deal objectives. However, maintaining fairway conditions despite floods and droughts and whilst enhancing natural ecological function remains a challenge. MERLIN believes in involving the navigation sector more effectively in integrated infrastructure development that considers the effect on the wider catchment, because this is key to achieving these win-wins.
Roundtables
The MERLIN roundtables aim to build a Community of Practice linking the economic sector representatives with MERLIN scientific and implementation partners, MERLIN scientists meet the sector representatives three times during the four years of the project.
Roundtables 1: to understand the motivation and interest of sectors and the impact of nature restoration on the sectors.
Roundtables 2: to share examples of river restorations and their impacts on the sectors; to focus on the MERLIN cases and to discuss pro and contra arguments; to extend the number of involved stakeholders. Introduce cross-sectoral discussions, discuss policy levers and sectoral cooperation opportunities.
Roundtables 3: to discuss sectoral strategies including value chain impacts and cross sectoral needs to ensure MERLIN outputs speak to the sector.
Roundtable 1
The navigation roundtable was held on March 22, 2022, organized by WWF Hungary with support of The James Hutton Institute. Twelve participants representing associations and commissions at EU and international scale - guest speaker from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers attended.
Roundtable 2
As part of the WP4 work package the 2nd Navigation Sector Roundtable was successful with the participation of 9 representatives from EU wide umbrella organizations and sector partners responsible for rivers like Danube, Rhine, Sava. The discussion was mainly about the cooperation points identified earlier and about the Nature-based-Solution approach. The participants discussed what NbS means in the context of the navigation, what are the knowledge gaps, conflicts of interest or win-win solutions. The responsibilities of the stakeholders on some rivers were discussed in order to find the motivations to move toward NbS and identify knowledge gaps. The findings of the RT2 are available in the final notes.
Roundtable 3
A total of 19 people were present at the roundtable, including representatives of navigation companies or associations, universities and research centres, the MERLIN project and case study leaders. During the event, participants discussed the potential for NbS in navigable waterways and the draft sectoral strategy.