Manual on Good Practices in Sustainable Waterway Planning

FGP

The new Manual provides guidelines for planning waterway development projects that are compatible with environmental protection requirements, creating a win-win situation. It offers general advice for waterway infrastructure projects and addresses both technical planners and other interested stakeholders who want to be involved in a waterway development planning process.  

The planning process of the Integrated River Engineering Project for the Danube east of Vienna (“Flussbauliches Gesamtprojekt”) served as a showcase for the development of a sustainable Waterway planning approach. The applied planning process manages to address ecological, water management and navigational goals simultaneously, leading to a sustainable improvement under all three aspects. Therefore essential results of the Manual are based on the experiences gained while planning the Austrian project. In addition, the innovative measures of the Integrated River Engineering Project, especially the re-connection of side arms, the riverbank restoration, the optimization of groynes and the granulometric river bed improvement, are described as good practises examples of ecological river engineering.  

The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) has co-ordinated the production of the Manual, which is the result of a consultative process between waterway operators and managers, and environmental organisations. According to Philip Weller, Executive Secretary of ICPDR: “This new planning tool will substantially enhance and smoothen communication between the transport and environment sectors.” To Mr Weller, the public discussions make it clear that “there is a strong need to guide future actions with an eye to reconciling what might be conflicting interests. Some innovative processes and measures have shown that it is indeed possible to create win-win solutions for environment, transport and other river uses.”  

The Manual can be downloaded on the PLATINA website: » » http://www.naiades.info/downloads     

Note: The NAIADES action plan is a Commission initiative to enhance the use of inland navigation as part of intermodal freight solutions, in order to create a sustainable, competitive and environmentally friendly European wide transport network. This objective was embraced by the inland navigation sector, who, together with the Commission have created PLATINA, an FP7 project consisting of 22 partners from nine different countries, in order to accelerate the achievement of the NAIADES aims. This multi-disciplinary knowledge network will allow PLATINA to create the momentum necessary to achieve the NAIADES objectives. Source: PLATINA

Links: » www.naiades.info