Disseminating Project Outcomes: the WaterDiss2.0 Project

Carolyn Roberts

Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network

University of Oxford

Wetlands for Water Management Meeting, CWA AGM, Cardiff University, 26 - 27th June 2013

Bridging the science-policy-industryinterface

• An urgent issue on the political agenda

• Getting your message across is challenging

• Successful dissemination depends on multiple factors

- concept and strategy

- time and resources (budget)

- professional knowledge brokering

Intended Outcomes?

• Replacement of lost wetlands –Earth Observations• Maintenance of biodiversity, maintenance of the

resource and of ecosystem services• Climate change mitigation through carbon

sequestration in biomass on land, in soil (IPCC reports)• Climate change adaptation through provision of flood

storage areas and retention in soil• Other catchment management objectives consistent

with EU WFD, such as water quality treatments• Environmental quality/human wellbeing improvements

A more powerful public message about recent research findings, which have confirmed the decreases in oxygen that are commensurate with increases in carbon dioxide from combustion of fossil fuels?

Manning et al., 2003

What are we waiting for?

• FUNDETEC report (FP6, 2007) noted ‘the typical length of time needed to complete the development cycle (in the water sector) is ten years”

• Research commissioned today would hence affect water management practices within about 12 years, long after the milestones of the Water Framework Directive (2015, 2021)

Why does dissemination matter?

• Millions of Euros of EU funding has supported water research

• Many projects have limited applicability

• Many have very unclear (or no real) outcomes

• When projects end, researchers move onto new things and are reluctant to engage

WaterDiss2.0 Objectives

• Improve dissemination by introducing an intermediate

step after research, just like a marketing team in the

industry would do

• Speed up the uptake of water-related FP6 and FP7

research results

• Improve the way research outputs are provided

EU-funded Water Projects

•Has the project finished or produced its intended outcomes?

•Can members of the project team still be located?

•Can any real tangible outputs be identified, and are there sufficient outputs or points of learning, of good quality?

•Are any of the outputs relevant or applicable to new circumstances?

•Are the project team or the PI willing and able to engage with dissemination activities?

•Do the contacts still have access to relevant materials that can be disseminated?

•Does the project already have a Dissemination strategy, and is its dissemination completed?

•Do the project team agree with the outcomes selected by the WaterDiss investigators?

Audiences and Opportunities

• Can an appropriate audience for the selected project outputs be identified?

• Can the audience be attracted to engage with a newly designed event or resource?

•Can project outcomes be grouped into similar themes to allow shared events or resources to be planned?

• Can a new regional event or resource be made sufficiently attractive to generate interest from a large audience?

• Can an existing regional event or resource be found with which the new material can be linked to assemble a large audience for project findings?

•Is the timing of the outputs and the events or resource availability the same?

WaterDissObjectives

•Does the selected project potentially contribute to trans-boundary sharing of outputs?

•Does the project contribute to development of understanding about water science, technology or policy?

•Are there modes of dissemination that could be appropriate for a project (e.g. papers, videos, events, presentations, teaching materials, technical manuals, one-to-one interactions, computer programmes), projects developed in collaboration with industry?

•Can the outcomes of the project, and their contribution more widely, be evaluated appropriately?

•Does the mixture of projects available allow the effectiveness of different dissemination strategies to be evaluated?

• The Westcountry Rivers Trust is an environmental charity that secures the preservation, protection, development and improvement of watercourses and water impoundments and advances the education of the public in the management of water.

• WRT works in partnership with individuals and organisations ranging from individual businesses through to academic institutions, NGOs and government departments to share expertise and facilitate better information transfer.

Characteristics of a successful project

Barriers to uptake

Facilitators to uptake

Supporting research dissemination

Dissemination should be •Adapted to a specific output•In appropriate format and language•At the right time for the project•Addressed to a specific audience•Use technical support of tools such as the European Water Community or ESKTN•Established by including it into the project plan right at the start

Modes of ‘Dissemination’

• Website• Academic paper in peer-

refereed journal• Conference presentation• Seminar for specialists• Company presentation• Policy brief• Article in Trade Press• Practitioner workshop

• Training package• E-seminar• Video on YouTube• One-to-one discussions with

stakeholders • Newsletters• Summer School for young

practitioners• OR do things

differently…..engage at the start

Chesborough,

IDS in Practice: Geoland2

http://europeanwatercommunity.eu/outputs/detail/7

REFRESH

WETwin – Sri Lanka, Switzerland, France, Belgium,

Germany, Hungary

• Enhancing the role of wetlands in integrated water resources management for twinned river basins in EU, Africa and South America

• Strategies for: utilizing drinking water supply and sanitation potentials of wetlands to benefit people living in the basin, while maintaining (and improving ) the ecosystem functions, adapting wetland management to changing environmental conditions, integrating wetlands into river basin management, improving stakeholder participation and capacity building with the aim of supporting sustainable wetland management

• The overall conceptual framework developed for WETwin was found to be robust and transferable to different contexts

AQUAREHAB – 19 partners including University of Sheffield, 2013 finish

• Innovative rehabilitation technologies for soil, groundwater and surface water, cope with a number of different priority contaminants (nitrates, pesticides, chlorinated compounds, aromatic compounds, mixed pollutions…) within heavily degraded water systems

• Case studies where the project will develop and assess rehabilitation technologies are the Scheldt (Belgium) and the Odense (Denmark) river basins, as well as the Sechor-Besor basin (Israel).

EUROWET – partners include Royal Holloway

• Integrate multidisciplinary European research in wetlands to attain the sustainable management of the water cycle. This will be achieved by the translation of state-of-the art science developed at both national and European levels, into practical guidance for end-users.

• Research and management experience is fragmentary and not sufficiently orientated to problem solving or simply inadequately framed to be effectively transferred to, or used by, stakeholders and policy-makers. The new Water Framework Directive (WFD) promotes a unique opportunity to redress this problem by means of the holistic, integrated approach to water management….

Doing things differently

• Dissemination should be implemented from the beginning, and after the end, of EU projects

• Need to develop specific appropriate and tailored dissemination methods

• Sufficient resources need to be allocated

• Need to measure the success of dissemination activities and uptake of research results

ESKTN

https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/sustainabilityktn