WaterProtect News:Field trips and workshops in Belgium and Italy, European Policy Conference, Participatory Monitoring, Best Management Practices for Mitigation, WaterProtect App

Enabling Drinking Water Protection in Rural and Urban Environment

Newsletter #4 - March 2019

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Message from the Project Coordinator

Ingeborg Joris (VITO)

Dear reader,

I am pleased to present you a new issue of the WaterProtect newsletter.

After our previous project coordinator Piet Seuntjens has taken back a step to focus on new challenges, I have the exciting task to coordinate the project for the second half. We want to thank Piet for his continuous efforts in coordinating the work and motivating people and wish him all further success.

The WaterProtect project is now well up to speed and in this newsletter our WP-leaders present you some of the results we achieved in participatory monitoring and best management practices. You also get a closer look into the Romanian and Danish action labs. Although very different in many respects, experiences in both action labs show the importance of raising awareness and convincing actors such as consumers they also have a stake in this. Working together is key to tackle water quality issues.

This is also the time to increase our efforts in bringing the results from the action labs to another level. We had a series of successful upscaling workshops in Poland, Italy and Belgium sharing experiences and learning from each other. The policy workshop in Brussels (organized jointly with FAIRWAY) brought together stakeholders from different backgrounds discussing synergies between water and agricultural policies and showing engagement to address water management challenges.

I wish you a pleasant reading!

Ingeborg Joris

Scroll down to discover the approach and the activities in our action labs.

Action Lab Italy

WaterProtect take a field trip in Val Tidone Action Lab

The Val Tidone winemaking reality was at the centre of the field visit of the WaterProtect Consortium in the Italian Action lab. In the misty morning of Sunday, November 11th, the project partners from the 7 countries involved in the project visited the vineyards and cellars of Val Tidone. The day after an important local workshop and stakeholder meeting was on the agenda. Read more.

Best Management Practices

in WaterProtect:

Update by Anna Kuczyńska, Work Package Leader

Programmes with measures and best management practices to minimise the impact resulting from agricultural practices to water resources and as such to protect the environment have been developed as part of the policy to meet the requirements of the Nitrates Directive (1991).

Despite these efforts, water monitoring data show that agriculture still extensively contributes to water quality problems across Europe. Anna Kuczyńska is the leader of this work package and gives us an update about the done work and the planning for the coming project time.