Blue Transition – Strategies and Challenges for climate resilient blue regions

The impact of climate change is a pressing issue that poses significant challenges to various aspects of our environment, economy, and society. One of the critical areas affected is groundwater resources. The Blue Transition project developed strategies to target a systemic change by an integrated water and soil management for better adaptation to climate change, to secure and improve groundwater resources that ensure the future availability of good-quality water while helping to revitalise natural habitats and reduce CO2 emissions.

A fundamental finding of the Blue Transition project is that strategies for climate-resilient groundwater and soil management in regions must be local and need to be developed in close cooperation with local stakeholders, communities, and policy makers. Local properties of soils, groundwater, ecology as well as water use, stakeholders and governance shape the measures which increase the resilience of our society. There are no generic solutions. However, we identified that change of land-use, an increase of soil health and a diversification of water sources are shared common aims of every local strategy and must be based on local system understanding, i.e. demand modeling, monitoring and linking of the physical- and ecological-system.

Besides shared aims, we identified significant joint challenges. System understanding is often based on natural science but expertise on economic and social impact should be embedded to derive common goals. Smaller shifts can be implemented in the short term, but a systemic change is a long-term process that faces significant barriers from legislation, politics, and the economy. In particular, conflicts of interest exist, and solving these conflicts needs support from overarching political targets.

We present examples from the projects pilot areas to underpin these findings.