An Fóram Uisce Annual report for 2020 is now available to download. It highlights the work of the Forum throughout the challenging year of 2020. The Forum’s second symposium planned for 20th March 2020 was cancelled with 10 days-notice owing to the implementation of COVID-19 restrictions. Fortunately, with the help of zoom the work of the Forum was able to continue unabated and during the course of the year 7 policy submissions were made to public consultations and 5 policy briefs and observations were published.
A substantial submission was made to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage on the Significant Water Management Issues consultation. The Forum proposes the adoption of a systems approach in the form of a Framework for Integrated Land and Landscape Management (FILLM) that enables more holistic environmental management. The FILLM builds on and is a reframing of the Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) approach used in water resources management. However, it broadens ICM to include other components such as biodiversity, climate change mitigation and soil health while retaining catchments as the landscape management units. FILLM as an overarching framework provides a means of connecting, for instance, the Water Framework Directive, Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, Habitats Directive, Floods Directive, Drinking Water Directive, climate change adaption and mitigation, soil conservation, spatial planning, and sustainable food and timber production. In addition, it is a means of achieving the UN Sustainability Goals for 2030.
Short Science videos on the Magic of Water were prepared for SFI’s National Science Week event and distributed to all schools in the country.
Research commissioned by the Forum on Optimising water quality returns from the Reform of CAP was presented at a webinar in December with contributions from Professor Alan Matthews, Professor John Fitzgerald, Lee Ann Jackson from the OECD and Michele Mc Cormack from Teagasc.
The Forum also launched its first Newsletter in Autumn 2020.
The Annual Report is available at:
TWF21002-An-Foram-Annual-Report-2020-Final.pdf (thewaterforum.ie)
