Integrated planning framework for successful river restoration projects: Upscaling lessons learnt from European case studies

N.V. Angelopoulos, I.G. Cowx and A.D. Buijse

Environmental Science & Policy, 2017, vol. 76, issue C, 12-22

Abstract: Despite considerable investment in river restoration projects, there is still limited information on the efficacy and success of river restoration activities. One of the main reasons is poor or improper project design, resulting in common problems such as: not addressing the root cause of habitat degradation; not establishing reference conditions, benchmarks and not defining endpoints against which to measure success; inappropriate uses of common restoration techniques because of lack of pre-planning; and inadequate monitoring or appraisal of restoration projects. In this paper peer-reviewed and grey literature and a large database of existing case studies were reviewed to identify the prevailing challenges river managers face when planning and developing river restoration projects. To overcome these current challenges an integrated project planning framework has been developed that incorporates adaptive management and project management techniques. It encapsulates key concepts and decision support tools to advance the existing sequence of project identification, project formulation, project implementation and post-project monitoring to incorporate multidisciplinary decision making to meet specific environmental and socio-economic objectives. The proposed river restoration project planning framework is adaptable and can therefore be applied to any project development scenario locally, regionally or internationally.

Keywords: River restoration; Project planning; Adaptive management; Success; Evaluation; Monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901117301387
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enscpo:v:76:y:2017:i:c:p:12-22

DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2017.06.005

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Science & Policy is currently edited by M. Beniston

More articles in Environmental Science & Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().