By Nathan Johnson
Frank van Lamoen is a Senior Officer and Researcher on Climate Change and Sustainable Development working in the Province of Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands. Lamoen travelled to Morahalom, Hungary in November 2011 for a Water CoRe workshop titled Connecting Regions and Stakeholders, part of Interreg IV C's Project on Water Scarcity and Drought. Noord-Brabant is one of the project's 12 partner regions, and Lamoen moderated two days of discussion from a number of Water CoRe stakeholders and partners, while giving three presentations of his own. During a break in his busy workshop schedule, Lamoen spoke briefly with Green Horizon about project aims and outcomes.
Tell a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in the Water CoRe project.
I'm a geographer, and I've worked most of my professional life for public institutions. For the Ministry I did some work on environmental impact assessments, which includes work with water-related issues. I then shifted to the provincial government-the region of Branbant-and then I worked for the Water Department, mostly concerning the relationship of water to regional sustainable development and climate change adaptation. The reason that Brabant is in this project is because it's one of the few places in Holland where we experience water shortages.
Where you contacted about this project specifically?
There's a content-related reason why we're involved, and a network-related reason. We started I think with three partner regions: Elie-Romagna in Italy, Aragon in Spain and Hessen in Germany, and this came out of the Encore network, which is a conference held every two years between ministers of environmental affairs. In addition to having a memorandum of understanding, at a certain point those three regions said 'well, we're really going to do it', using Interreg as a platform, and then they went searching for partners. We know Hessen from another project in which we cooperated.
As I said, we've had problems with issues related to water scarcity, so we were happy to join this project, though I think we were one of the last of the 14 partners to join.
What can you tell us about the selection process?There were the first three who founded the project. I'm not really sure about the others, but it mostly depends on what are your contacts and various networks. As to why we were looking for a variety of regions, if you look at Interreg C and their requirements it's always good to have some East European countries, South European countries, West European countries-so they were looking for a mix. Interreg C is about cooperation all over Europe, so it really helps if you have partners from every corner of Europe.
Do you have any thoughts about particular advantages to problem solving from a regional level?A regional approach is more down to earth. On that scale you can really do something, whereas on a national scale it's more about setting up regulations or initiatives-it's more abstract. Also at a regional level things become more practical and can even reach further to lower levels, such as municipalities or specific locations. Also, if you look at regions and the challenges we're looking at, they're quite complex; and you're going to find a lot of institutions at local level that are really trying to deal with those complex, integrated issues. In this sense, a regional level is in between between the integrated level which you also find in national institutions and the practical level which you find in local institutions. This makes a regional platform ideal for addressing issues like, say, water scarcity and drought.
Do regions also tend to be strong lobbying platforms?That's another reason. Most of those regions have their contacts in Brussels, so that's helpful in getting funds and establishing a cooperation network. There is the Committee of Regions and other organisations for promoting cooperation between regions, and most of those regions have a representavie in Brussels, and sometimes they're in the same building and know each other, so it's a good working network-something the local communities lack. So it's a nice intermediate level in which you can do practical work.
Talk a little bit about one of the main project outputs, the Good Practice Guide.It's mainly meant as a reference tool, but one of the surprising aspects is that a lot of those good practices which might sound very focused on local issues are really transferable to other regions as well. And that exceeds my expectations. It's gratifiying to see that this sort of thing works, when you can showcase what you've done and try and connect it to other regions. But the Good Practice Guide, fact sheet and e-learning tool are also meant for non-partners-those who were not involved in this project or not generally familiar with the best practices. So they can find their solutions as well drawing from the experiences of this project.
Many of the proposed solutions resulting from the project take are more focused on adaptation, rather than, say, mitigation, prevention or reducing consumption. Is this simply the most realistic approach to take?There is a lot of focus on adaption, especially when it comes to climate change. If you look at the issue of water scarcity, it's not an issue from the future. It's there already in lot of regions, and we have to deal with it now as well. You can, for example, reduce water demand so that we use less water, but we're also looking at ways to deliver more water to regions facing shortage. I showed a graph yesterday about how this project is structured: there are several working groups, one working on the demand side to diminish demand, and another group is focused on managing or coping with droughts. The latter can involve bringing water into the system or preserving water during wet periods for use during dry periods. So there's all types of measures. Climate change just adds another dimension to all these measures, in terms of asking what will we have to deal with in the future.
So does climate change add a sense of urgency?It does add a sense of urgency, but it's not the only issue because, as I said, we experience drought and water scarcity already. If the climate wasn't changing we'd still have to do something-especially because you see water demand rising and rising.
