The fourth up-scaling workshop by Water Protect was hosted by the Irish Action Lab on the 17th June 2019 in Wexford County Council, Wexford, Ireland. The theme was “Science, water governance and policy implementations: Scaling up to European level” and the day included talks from a number of stakeholders (EPA, Wexford County Council, Teagasc Agricultural Catchments Programme (ACP), Local Authorities Waters and Communities Office (LAWCO), Agricultural Sustainability Support and Advisory Programme (ASSAP), Glanbia Ingredients Ireland and DG Environment) demonstrating the Irish and European strategy and action for improving drinking water quality.
There were also examples from other Action Labs (Belgium and Denmark), from the FAIRWAY project and followed by a session on sustainable water use by the food production industry (EWP, ABP and Central Solutions).
On the 18th June the WaterProtect core group meeting was held in Teagasc Environmental Research Centre in Johnstown castle. The meeting was finalised by an ACP hosted field visit to the Castledockerell catchments. Here the monitoring infrastructure and some research findings from the ACP was presented together with a demonstration of new monitoring of MCPA in water carried out within Water Protect.
The two days are summarised:
These two eventful days was also the start for Shervin Shahvi as a Post Doc within the Irish Action Lab. Shervin will be mapping the water governance in Ireland, try to identify the regulatory bottlenecks for protection of drinking water and assess the role and interaction between stakeholders through interviews and analysis using a “Fuzzy Cognitive Map software” together with a “Neural Network” method.