Description (EN): TRAP deals with the challenge of integrated management of rivers & river territories. Its purpose is to build on and transfer good practices that embed aquatic & cultural heritage landscape protection in regional, sustainable growth solutions. TRAP contributes to the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the European Landscape Convention (ELC) and the Europe 2020 strategy. The WFD establishes a framework for the protection of inland surface waters, transitional waters, coastal waters and groundwater; good water status is to be achieved by 2015 throughout the EU. The ELC stresses European identity & diversity through the protection, management & planning of European landscapes, living natural & cultural heritage, ordinary or outstanding, urban or rural, on land or in water. Europe 2020 is the EU’s growth strategy for the coming decade, aiming at smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Reaching good water quality status, continuing the WFD implementation and addressing
the ELC, require considerable resources & upscale development solutions.These relate to regional policy areas dealing with the resources & tools required to improve and sustain river basins' quality, stakeholder involvement & commitment in maintaining good water quality, as well as solutions & tools ensuring high quality, inclusive growth.Thus, the overall objective of TRAP is to benefit from partners' good practices in these policy areas and improve accordingly regional policies & tools.TRAP focuses on 4 THEMATIC AREAS (TA:s) for the good practice analysis. The first three build directly on the WFD; their purpose is to support the implementation of the regional river basin action plans (RBAP), while the 4th introduces more directly the growth dimension.
TA1 GOVERNANCE:processes ensuring stakeholder commitment to the implementation of the WFD & the RBAP in their regions; especially economic impact assessment tools as a base for stakeholder involvement & consensus buildingmethodologies;
TA2 MONITORING: monitoring programmes & measurement tools ensuring the enforceability of the WFD; TA3 AQUATIC ENVIRONMENT:enhancement of the aquatic environment policies, projects, & technologies; TA4 RIVER TOURISM:products, plans & tools integrating landscape protection into diversified (ELC), inclusive river territory development & growth (Europe 2020)
POLICY TOOLS: the policy implementation plans target the RBAP:s, regional development plans & liaise with Natura 2000.
KEY OUTPUTS: 9 policy implementation plans; 1 jointly developed integrated river territory management model.
PROJECT PARTNERSHIP: 10 project partners (PP), out of which 5 are regional policy makers and have provable policy impact potential: Kainuu (FI)-LP, Shannon, MidWest & SouthWest (IE), Wales (UK), SI, Bucarest (RO), Western Macedonia (GR), Zemgale (LV), and (NL).
During the prepration period we identified 23 GPs to analyse and transfer, covering both the FWD & the ELC.
Read more Achievements (EN): The starting point of TRAP is how to internalise important socio (=heritage, cultural) / environmental externalities into effective growth & land use models so as to ensure protection of the said externalities / vulnerabilities through consensus of the stakeholders. This is a long time on going discussion and the background for many EU policies and initiatives such as the revised sustainable development strategy (2006), the eco innovation policy, the EcoInnovation Initiative, the Lead Market Initiative and many others. What TRAP contributes to this discussion is the focus on overall economic development criteria of an area & its land use aspects. TRAP question is: granted the requirement to achieve (maintain, rehabilitate, monitor, protect) good water status by 2015 as well as ensure suitable landscape protection in general, what are the economic & otherwise development tools available leading to growth and minimising in the process the relative weight of protection externalities? The answer to this question, through the contributions of 25 good practices (GP), is a regional development dynamics that demonstrates how it successfully addresses the notion of ‘protection & development’, ‘protection through development’ and ‘protection only but affordable’, and leads to the model of attractive regional growth. GPs contributions can be summarised as follows: All 25 TRAP GPs combine methodological with demonstration, tangible sides. In a few cases technologies are also involved. Among the 25 GPs there are important and transferable direct contributions to the implementation of the river basin action plans (RBAP Art.13 of the Water Framework Directive). Such GPs deal more with monitoring approaches and data bases; and there are important solutions of natural and aquatic rehabilitation & protection reflecting mainly public investments and / or public private partnership initiatives. Such solutions even if inevitably contextually defned and generic in nature, provide, nevertheless interesting transferable tools and demonstrable results. This type of solutions can be transferred both as general environmental initiatives as well as under Programmes (= rehabilitation actions) of the RBAP:s. The European Landscape Convention (ELC) is taken up explicitly only by one GP. However, landscape issues are strongly addressed by planners in at least 4 out of the 10 TRAP regions. During the 1st semester, it was possible to open up the concept of the ELC as well as of landscape assessment tools such and the Shannon Index, LUCAS and Landmap. Such tools measure landscape diversity & ecological vulnerabiltiy including ecological, heritage, and visual vulnerabilties. While none of these tools are definitive, there is a growing consensus that they are essential to planning & economic development. Finally, we identified comprehensive trade off aproaches, including institutional context, methodological tools, governance and demonstrable results. Most of the contributed good practices contain trade off elements. However, only a few could be described as comprehensive methodologies.Stakeholder involvement starts from the very beginning of the development process. Maybe the most radical type of trade off solutions comes from our NL partner where, when necessary, development needs are accomodated by land ownership swapping. An interesting tool is the economic appraisal of the eco system services proposed by our UK partner. Our Shannon partner has supported a comprehensive tourism development plan utilising landscape and eco system vulnerabiltiy tools, development audits and benchmarking development options. In these good practices, while contextual and institutional aspects might be a little difficult to adopt, the legislative and methodological tools are easily transferable.
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