Almost 50 Good Practices in waterways management have been identified by the 17 Waterways Forward partners. These have been summarised in the Demo Toolbox which is now availablle to all interested parties. Click here to download a copy WF DEMO TOOLBOX – May 2011
In his introduction to the Toolbox, Project Manager Nico van Lamsweerde says;
“The identified practices in this Toolbox are just a first step in the process of disclosing available knowledge and transferring this knowledge across Europe to further boost the values of Inland Waterways in the interest of a sustainable regional development future of Europe!”
“The Waterways Forward project is nearly halfway. The 17 partners in this project coming from 11 EU countries and from Norway and Serbia worked intensively in the past 15 months to get more acquainted with each other’s particular problems and challenges on how to manage inland waterways in such a way that it contributes to the socio economic development of the adjacent regions but also with a focus on respecting nature and environment.
Partners discussed intensively during two international project workshops how to find a balance between these two objectives. To streamline this debate each partner developed an in depth regional analyses of their situation and they involved many regional stakeholders in this process.
Based on a synthesis report of the regional analyses reports, partners came together to discuss regional practices and to identify the good ones. These practices are subject to the Transfer visits to partner regions, which are carried out in spring and summer of 2011.
The selected practices are all presented in this Demo Toolbox. I believe that this Toolbox will be of significant interest and will serve as a source of inspiration in the next years for many regions in Europe dealing with topics related to the management of inland waterways. This is the case already for the project partners but I am sure that this will also be the case for many other regions in Europe.
Waterways Forward is entering its second inspiring phase of implementation. During some expert Master classes we will try to accelerate the knowledge built up until now and we will try to find practical approaches to share knowledge on topics which could not be tackled by the Waterways Forward project so far but which will contribute to further improve the Waterways Forward results after the lifetime of the project.”