Sectoral Activities: Water Supply and Sanitation Strategy & Briefing

Resource description:

Strategy

The successful implementation of NbS in freshwater restoration relies heavily on collaboration and coordination across sectors due to their interdependencies and shared reliance on healthy ecosystems. Each Sectoral Strategy highlights key connections with others, emphasizing the need for integrated approaches to overcome challenges and leverage opportunities for transformation.

Water supply and sanitation depends on cooperation with Agriculture, Peat Extraction, and Navigation to reduce pollution and ensure sustainable water resource management. Implementing NbS at a larger scale often involves changes in land use and water management practices, necessitating collaboration with private landowners, public authorities, and other stakeholders. For example, wetlands restored in agricultural areas can filter pollutants and improve water quality for WSS operations. Such coordination can be complex and take a long time, requiring clear mandates, coalition-building, and long-term commitments. Strengthening workforce capacity and ensuring easy access to tools, methodologies, and case studies are crucial for bridging knowledge gaps and facilitating effective NbS integration.

Briefing

The water sanitation and supply sector relies on clean water and recognises the importance of nature-based solutions for reducing their costs and improving sustainability of supply and treatment. To date, most of the focus has been on wastewater treatment with less focus on upstream protection of the drinking water supply using Mature-based Solutions. MERLIN is addressing how the water sanitation and supply sector can collaborate with upstream water managers restoring Europe’s peatlands, wetlands, riparian areas and floodplains to help maintain water supply whilst responding to the biodiversity and climate crises.