Insights from the European Ocean Days in Brussels
-
Rivers and Lakes
Through our EUROLakes project, we joined the European Ocean Days in Brussels from 3 to 7 March, a unique platform to exchange ideas across diverse maritime and freshwater stakeholders, allowing participants to engage with sustainable blue economy, showcasing the EU Mission Ocean action and blue investments, and pave the way for concrete actions.
Through a series of interconnected events relevant to maritime and freshwater topics, every session focused on key water-related themes. The major one was the ‘Mission Ocean and Waters Forum‘, an annual event aiming to showcase the Mission Ocean best practices, community exchanges and means to achieve Water-related objectives by 2030.
This year, the forum highlighted research and innovation solutions developed to support the Mission Ocean’s goals. By covering topics such as protecting and restoring ecosystems, eliminating pollution, achieving climate neutrality and circularity, and securing funding for deployment and scaling efforts, participants discussed necessary future steps to reach the 2030 targets.
EUROLakes on stage to promote nature-based solutions
Our Rivers&Lakes manager Paul Brotherton was invited as guest panelist in a session on Water Resilience Strategy for the EU, along with the FERRO project and researchers from the Flanders Marine Institute, the Norwegian Institute for Water Research and the Institute of Hydraulic Engeneering and River Research.
After presenting our EUROLakes project, which is part of Mission Ocean and Waters, he elaborated on what is needed to make Europe more water resilient:
“From where I sit, wetlands are our planetary superheroes. We just heard how we’ve lost 50% globally – this is closer to 80% of wetlands lost in Europe. These are our water stores in the landscape, our natural sponges. And the floods, droughts, fires in Europe are a direct consequence of losing so much of our natural water storage. Wetlands are amazingly effective at multi-benefit solutions – reducing flood and drought risk, filtering pollutants, storing carbon, and supporting biodiversity – all at once. There are plenty of pilots demonstrating these benefits. What’s needed is to deploy these nature-based solutions at a much wider scale. It requires more tools, financing and incentives to reward investments that make our landscapes more water resilient.“
Follow our EUROLakes project website, Instagram and LinkedIn, and don’t miss any update on how we upscale nature-based solutions at European level.