Over the past few years the tone of the debate around climate change has shifted from sceptical to soberingly urgent as the global community has prioritised the research into solutions which will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. So far this research has been insufficient. One of the major problems for driving public and private stakeholders to implement existing solutions and research new ones is how we communicate about climate change (Stoknes, 2014). There seems to be a lack of common language that drives the scientific community away from policymakers and the public. Due to this lack, it is hard to translate findings into viable and sustainable solutions and to adopt new climate-neutral economies and habits.
MULTIFILE
Het is misschien wel het grootste vraagstuk van onze eeuw: hoe gaan we om met klimaatverandering? Floris Bogaard weet in ieder geval dat in Nederland de wadi –een wateropnemende en -zuiverende ‘greppel’ in stedelijk gebied – een groot verschil maakt. Hij reist het land door en onderzoekt samen met studenten, bewoners, gemeenten, waterschappen en bedrijven hoe ze dat verschil nog groterkunnen maken.
The natural environment is dependent on water to provide society with many essential benefits or “ecosystemservices” (e.g. drinking water, biodiversity, food production, recreation, carbon sequestration). A number of EUdirectives aim to protect and improve the delivery of these services. However, successful implementation andintegration of the different directives at a local level is a major shared challenge in the North Sea Region.Understanding how this can be achieved is fundamental to delivering long-term sustainable ecosystem-basedmanagement strategies for the North Sea Region and the focus for the WaterCoG project.The project will demonstrate through the adoption of new participatory, ecosystem service based approachesthat implementation and integration of different water management frameworks can be achieved at the sametime as providing additional social, economic and environmental benefits not currently being realised.A strong transnational component will identify and incorporate common, transferable elements of differentapproaches into an up-scaling toolbox that will extend the impact of the project and build capacity for deliveringimproved sustainable management strategies for North Sea Region ecosystems.The projects’ output aims for a change in working practice that will improve the integration between top-downimplementation of European and national directives and bottom-up, participatory developed solutions forimproving the quality and sustainable management strategies of North Sea Region ecosystems.