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Restoring degraded water ecosystems
Until the last 20 to 30 years, the focus of physical water management in many parts of Europe was on providing flood protection, facilitating navigation, and ensuring the drainage of agricultural land and urban areas.
Nowadays, water management increasingly includes ecological concerns, working with natural processes. This is in line with the objective of the 7th EAA 'to protect, conserve and enhance the Union's natural capital'. It is also consistent with Target 2 of the EU's Biodiversity Strategy that aims to ensure maintenance of ecosystems and their services by establishing green infrastructure and restoring at least 15% of degraded ecosystems by 2020. This target means that degraded aquatic ecosystems must also be restored. Synergies between policies can be important in restoring aquatic ecosystems.
Restoring aquatic ecosystems such as 'making room for the river', river restoration or floodplain rehabilitation, 'coastal zone restoration projects' and integrated coastal zone management has multiple benefits for the water ecosystems. The EU-wide Green Infrastructure Strategy[29] includes rivers and floodplains as important elements. The strategy aims to reconnect existing nature areas and improve the overall quality of ecosystems. It also includes Natural Water Retention Measures (NWRMs)[30] that aim to increase soil and landscape water retention and groundwater recharge.
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its 7th EAP not EAA.
regarding synergies and our comments I would say in the last sentence: "The above mentioned integration between policies can be important in restoring aquatic ecosystems ".
in the next para it would be nice if you could cite EEA report 14/2017 e.g. saying at the end of the para: "nature based solutions and respective measures can not only help restoration, but can also have clear co-benefits by promoting cost-efficient flood risk reduction via green infrastructure solutions [cit 14/2017] "
it might be worthwhile to explore an additional paragraph on wetlands and their restoration also outside the floodplain issue.
I am also missing our recurring argument on small water bodies. sure, we said it before, but it is still an issue, I think. you might want to add that here or in connection with the coordination between WFD and Nature directives. maybe here it would be factual, related to the functionality of small water bodies, less understood a s a deficit of the WFD.
SK: Page 75, 3rd paragraph: Probably, there should be mentioned 7th EAP (Environmental Action Programme) instead of „7th EEA“.