NICHES_MS2.1.pdf

Co-designing the impact assessment and ES model

NICHES advances scientific knowledge on restorative NBS through the application and testing of impact assessments, models and transitional governance models for improved urban drainage in five cases within and beyond Europe. The project hypothesizes and aims to demonstrate that sustainable transformations of cities based on restorative NBS which enhance water retention capacities in urban areas could widely mitigate impacts from combined sewers on aquatic ecosystems. As the urban catchment is part of a multi-owner landscape with associated stakeholder conflicts linked through teleconnections and multi-scale governance structures, the involvement of diverse stakeholders and their values from the NICHES core cities is vital to co-design the impact assessment and ES module design and to ensure maximal applicability. This milestone report describes the stakeholder engagement activity carried out in the Rotterdam case study. With representatives from the waterboard, the municipality and a drinking water company, the Nature Futures Framework of the IPBES (Pereira et al., 2020) was operationalized using the three horizons approach as described by Sharpe et al. (2016) during an interactive workshop. This allowed for identification of desired futures of the Rotterdam urban waterscape, including the use and functioning of the Rotterdam waters