Climate and Land Use Change are increasing pressures on water resources. Changing rainfall patterns, alongside intensification of agriculture (often resulting in increased input of fertilizers and pesticides and machinery) and urbanisation (with increased surface sealing and urban pollution) impact water quality as well as water quantity not only in the environment but also for human consumption. Increasing resilience of catchments to the combined effects of these pressures necessitates different actors to work together to address these challenges and implement ecosystembased adaptation.
One approach is through the use of rewarding mechanisms in the form of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes, which can bring together those benefitting from adaptation measures and those delivering them through (financial) incentives that create benefit for both stakeholders.
A key objective of the PROWATER project is to pave the way to an actual and operational rewarding/funding scheme for the implementation of EbA measures that increase the hydrological resilience to droughts. We follow a methodic procedure. The first step is to make a SWOT analysis of such a PEbA rewarding/funding scheme. Therefore, a series of workshops have been organized in Autumn 2018 and Spring 2019 to make an inventory of potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In these workshops we discussed the need and desirability of PES-schemes from different perspectives.
The results have been gathered in three regional SWOT reports, that can be found here.