Achieving Sustainable Catchment Management: Developing Integrated Approaches and Tools to Inform Future Policies

• Start date: 01 July 2004
• End date: 30 September 2005

The project brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines relating to the natural environment and the impact of land use, with those who seek to understand and explain human beliefs, needs and actions. The aim is to provide scientists with opportunities to learn across disciplines and to explore ways of integrating the management of water and land resources across the UK in a sustainable manner.
There are three main strands to the project: to explore how to 'bring together' data collected from different areas or times and for different purposes; how local knowledge can be better taken into account; and how to manage land and water resources in the next 20 years. A particular and cross-cutting focus is to unravel issues of scale (geographical, temporal, institutional...).

Three workshops will be held to bring together project members and invited advisors from the policy-making community to explore current knowledge and methods in managing catchments. The workshops will also seek to identify gaps in current knowledge and management issues. The planned outputs are scoping reports of specific methodologies, and an approach that can deliver a multi-objective interdisciplinary framework for catchment management that is relevant to policy development (and will be tested in a follow-on project).