The LIFE Ebro Resilience P1 Project held this Thursday, May 7, at the headquarters of the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation (CHE), the final session of the first phase of the Conflict Transformation Group on floods, one of the forums for social participation promoted by the Project. The meeting was welcomed by the Water Commissioner of the CHE, Miriam Pardos, and reaffirmed the commitment of the partner administrations to this pilot space for dialogue, real participation and mediation.
Created in December 2022, the group was born as a stable forum to address, from active listening and shared analysis, the main points of tension around flood risk management in the middle reaches of the Ebro.
During these years, 16 working sessions have been held , some of them including a descent down the river to get to know it from the inside. The meetings have been itinerant, touring the intervention areas (Alfaro, Castejón, Osera de Ebro, Fuentes de Ebro), but also other surrounding municipalities. They have been attended by the same group of people, including those affected, representatives of the primary sector, representatives of tourist uses, administrations, ecologists and members of the academic world from the three Autonomous Communities (La Rioja, Navarra and Aragón) and, especially, from the riverside towns.
Consolidated space
The group has established itself as a valuable space for the territory, capable of bringing together diverse visions and generating a climate of trust between sectors with different sensibilities. Throughout the sessions, issues of great depth have been addressed, among others:
- The usefulness and scope of participatory processes.
- Accessibility of government information.
- Flood emergency protocols.
- Intervention alternatives in the face of floods.
- The effectiveness of dredging and vegetation management.
- The relationship between river restoration and socioeconomic development.
- Compensations and the impact of floods on depopulation.
This process has helped to bring positions closer together, identify common ground and reduce initial tensions, consolidating it as a transformative experience for all parties. In the final session, the participants expressed their interest in continuing the group whenever possible, maintaining this constructive space for dialogue.
During the final session, the participants left a great challenge on the table for further work and analysis. How to transfer the lessons learned and the experience to other groups, to the sectors that each one represents, how to make it useful for other water management issues and even other topics, and how to concretize the points in common so that they become proposals for action? With these key questions, the members of the group concluded their interventions.
The CHE and the other partner administrations of the LIFE Ebro Resilience P1 Project have supported from the beginning this pilot initiative, aligned with the principles of the project’s Participation Plan, which promotes governance, inter-administrative coordination, transparency and the integration of the diversity of stakeholders in the territory.
This support has been key to consolidating a model of real participation in flood risk management, which goes beyond identifying proposals, and seeks greater awareness of tensions between stakeholders and finding joint ways to resolve or transform them.
The LIFE Ebro Resilience P1 Project (LIFE20 ENV/ES/00327) is promoted by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), through the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation and the public companies TRAGSA and TRAGSATEC; the Governments of La Rioja, Navarra -through the Environmental Management of Navarra- and Aragón, through the Aragonese Water Institute, with the support of the LIFE financial instrument of the European Union.
The project develops adaptation measures, recovery of river space and strengthening of social capacities in two sections of the Ebro, with a view to replicability in other Spanish and European basins.