On the 28th and 29th of February, the Netherlands Centre for River studies (NCR) conference will be held. The NCR is the leading cooperative alliance between all major Dutch research institutes for river studies. The disciplines within NCR are contributed by its partners are Hydrodynamics and Morphodynamics, Geomorphology and sedimentology, River ecology and water quality & River governance, serious gaming, and spatial planning. Each year, the NCR organizes a conference to share and exchange the latest relevant research topics between academia and water management organizations. This year’s theme is ‘Tomorrow’s Rivers’ and will cover the research topics on river restoration and Nature-based Solutions (NbS).
Schematic representation of ResiRiver workpackages and end goal
This is an excellent opportunity to inform the audience about the objectives, the ambitions, and the organization of our Interreg North-West Europe ResiRiver project: mainstreaming and upscaling the application of NbS in large- and small-scale river systems by bridging the gap between practice, science, society, and policy. Ralph Schielen and Yvo Snoek (from Rijkswaterstaat) will attend the NCR days. They will present the first results and lessons learned on the application of the IUCN standard self-assessment tool on our pilots, as initiated by workpackage 1. Furthermore, they will use the discussion and interaction at the NCR days as input for the ResiRiver-activities:
- Create training material, where they use the experience from the ResiRiver pilot studies as well as insights from previous projects and scientific evaluations in workpackage 2.
- Develop strategies, action-plans and guidelines that build upon existing material, to assess the pilot studies and quantify the NbS co-benefits in those initiatives in workpackage 3.
- Use the scientific partners and associated partners in the project to set up a Science Team that takes up the scientific challenge to develop new concepts for mainstreaming and upscaling, based on the experiences gained in the pilots and the discussions in the various workpackages. The newly developed concepts will be tested and reflected scientifically and published in journals, such that the knowledge is stored and can be used by the NbS-community.
The overall aim is to further connect our work in ResiRiver to interested researchers and research topics, with potential new linkages to the ResiRiver Science Team. The more solid scientific evidence we can include in our work, the higher potential success we can obtain in mainstreaming and upscaling NbS in river systems.
ResiRiver will also be present at the RiverFlow-2024 conference, in Liverpool, UK. RiverFlow is a biannually conference, organized for the first time in 2002, where science meets practitioners, and is therefore an excellent stage to present the first results of ResiRiver, but also gather feedback and new ideas. Nature-based Solutions get increasingly more attention as one of the means to mitigate climate change, and we are excited to learn from other initiatives in the world. Participating in scientific conferences like RiverFlow is an excellent way to do this.
