Main authors: Birgitte Hansen, Hyojin Kim, Ingelise Møller, Abel Henriot, Marc Laurencelle, Tommy Dalgaard, Morten Graversgaard, Susanne Klages, Claudia Heidecke and Nicolas Surdyk
FAIRWAYiS Editor: Jane Brandt
Source document: »Birgitte Hansen, Hyojin Kim, Ingelise Møller, Abel Henriot, Marc Laurencelle, Tommy Dalgaard, Morten Graversgaard, Susanne Klages, Claudia Heidecke and Nicolas Surdyk 2021. Evaluation of ADWIs: agri-drinking water quality indicators in three case studies (FAIRWAY Project Deliverable 3.2)

 

Take home messages

The above leaflet was prepared to disseminate the importance of linking agricultural impact and drinking water quality response by using examples from our 3 case studies in Denmark and France. The leaflet stresses that a better understanding of the relationships between mitigation measures and drinking water quality is necessary to achieve a long-lasting efficient drinking water protection plan. The lag time and/or link between agricultural impact and drinking water quality response may be the most important information for a successful protection strategy. The link indicator is important for both communication of results to stakeholders and for the design of monitoring programs.

The leaflet is intended to disseminate our findings to relevant stakeholders (e.g. farmers, waterworks, and authorities). In the leaflet, several key take-home messages are formulated that could initiate a dialog with stakeholders. Workshops with Multi-Actor Platforms were planned both in Denmark and in France for presentations and discussions in 2020 but are postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 situation.

A presentation on lag-time, using these results, was given in the framework of the »EUROPE-INBO 2020 CAP Workshop - New CAP: an opportunity for water policies? web-conference on 9 November 2020. The purpose of the presentation was to highlight the importance of coherency and consistency in farming measures since in some hydrological context, only long-term coherent policies will produce sufficient effects. Overwhelming short-term measures will not produce effect in a short time range. In addition, inconsistent policies (i.e. subsidies of mitigation measures change every five years) may not produce significant effect.

Concerning the stakeholder involvement and indicators setting, passive samplers were given by the French BRGM to the water company to both involve local stakeholders in monitoring and for improving the water quality monitoring by adding an integrative sampling to punctual sampling. With this new sampling technique, the water company want to understand pesticide bypass transfers in some springs and eventually monitor more sites including surface water. In this process, more farmers could be directly involved. See »Use of passive samplers in drinking water catchments.

 


Note: For full references to papers quoted in this article see

» References