Romina presenting case study results in Bruxelles, October 2018

For a bit more than three years has the H2020 project Aquacross been running research on aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem services. Therein we lead the case study on understanding eutrophication and restoration in the Rönne å catchment in Skåne. Last week, we had our final conference in Bruxelles with about 100 participants to discuss our results and ways to impact European policy making. In support of this event, our case study representative Richard Nilsson from the Ringsjön water council joined. Together, we presented our final case study report where we highlight the application of resilience principles for analysing our case and the meaning of collaboration for different actors in water governance. In our conclusions we put forward

1. resilience thinking as a way to engage in long-term planning,
2. the issue of trade-offs among co-produced ecosystem services which need strategic and long-term planning,
3. the potential role of water councils to build cross-cutting alliances for improved, multi-functional water management.

More concrete analyses with the simulation model LimonSES are ongoing to identify how short-term vs. long-term measures affect time lags of lake restoration (LimnoSES is also available on CoMSES).

The good news for this case study is that it will find a new home after Aquacross under the Biodiversa/Belmont Forum project LimnoScenES. So soon, we are glad to coordinate social-ecological scenario studies on temperate freshwaters looking simultaneously at climate change and pollution. The project will start in January and run for three years. Already in the proposal phase, we had been in contact with several stakeholders to take their interests into account. We are looking forward to this transition happening and will present more details on LimnoScenES here soon.

P.S. My travel to Bruxelles caused about 740 kg CO2 emissions monitored by the Travel Tracker from the Tyndall Centre. Stockholm University has a program to offset carbon emissions caused by air travel.