Sustainable rural water management for sustainable agriculture

Project FLOW will test a(n institutional) model for holistic water management in a agriculture dominated catchments. It will demonstrate an integrated planning process to design and implement land use and drainage management measures to enhance current policy responses for water quality targets in a cost-effective way while sustaining the productive capacity of agriculture and related rural sectors in the catchment. The project will create national and international knowledge sharing platforms across environmental, agricultural and spatial planning authorities supported by improved decision support tools and tested models for local cooperative implementation of water management measures related to field drainage, water purification and retention.
The project seeks to enhance the coordinated implementation of the WFD and CAP policy frameworks on the national and regional levels while, in relevant respects, acknowledging the synergies and gaps with other policy sectors, such as floods (FD), habitat and fisheries management. As additional value added, the project will consider and demonstrate synergies across agricultural drainage and water quality management and aquaculture and advance the recognition of these synergies in municipal and regional spatial planning.
The main target groups of the project are respective authorities and environmental and spatial planners on regional and municipal levels. Secondary target groups are national authorities, landowners groups (e.g. drainage associations), agricultural advisory services and national research institutes. Additionally, the project will involve banks and entrepreneurs in the recreation branch in dialogue on investments in the rural landscapes.
The project is a direct response to the global challenges of climate change, competing land uses, agricultural productivity and the decreasing water and carbon retention capacity of the soil. It presents a Baltic Sea Region response to these challenges which executes multilevel governance and aims to increase cost-effectiveness of environmental and agricultural policy implementation. Its focus is in line with the EU and national circular and bioeconomy strategies with respect to nutrient recirculation and cross-sector synergies. The project partnership represents key actors in the partner countries with a strong interest in advancing holistic water management, sustainable agriculture and bioeconomy. The project brings together a broad network of actors and will use and convey lessons and experiences from several related research and local development projects.