Climate change exacerbates the frequency and intensity of both floods and droughts. Despite widespread recognition that improving the water retention capacity of landscapes or sponge functioning is a suitable approach to increase society's resilience to climate change and its effects, implementation of such approaches is still lagging. A key challenge is to mobilise and involve all relevant actors for the inclusive and integrative design and implementation of effective sponge measures and to translate long-term, regional river basin strategies to practical action perspectives. To address this challenge, this fully funded PhD position aims to develop approaches for inclusive, integrative and effective co-creation and knowledge production processes and to support their implementation processes. To achieve this aim, the PhD candidate is involved in the following tasks:
- Investigating existing approaches and (digital) tools that support co-creative processes and translates these findings into practical guidance for integrated and inclusive design and implementation of sponge measures.
- Critically reflecting on current design and implementation processes of practitioners and supporting them in the adoption of more inclusive implementation processes for water retention.
- Enabling transformative change of river basin management by connecting the guidelines for sponge measures design and implementation to formal policy and decision-making processes of stakeholders. This is done by co-creating road maps with public actors and societal stakeholders for long-term sponge strategies at river-basin level.
The project The PhD research is part of the EU HORIZON2020 project called: “SpongeWorks: Co-creating and Upscaling Sponge Landscapes by Working with Natural Water Retention and Sustainable Management”. This four-year project is an Innovation Action project, which emphasizes the actual implementation of solutions. Therefore, practice and research are strongly interwoven. Spongeworks starts on the 1st of September 2024. SpongeWorks was initiated to lead the way for an urgently needed upscaling of ‘sponge measures’ as nature-based solutions (NbS) to boost the natural water retention capacity in European river basins, thereby making regions more resilient to impacts of climate change. SpongeWorks follows an integrative multi-actor approach to demonstrate the effectiveness of multifunctional sponge measures with soil, water quality and biodiversity co-benefits in three large-scale demonstrators in the Pinios (GR), Lèze (FR) and Vecht (NL/DE) river basins. The PhD candidate of the UT part will predominantly work in the NL/DE context and interacts with stakeholders in other contexts via the ‘train the trainer’ concept. Interactions with other researchers and practice partners ensures the delivery of context-specific and generalisable results to be applied by practitioners to river basins all over Europe.