Management Actions
As everywhere in the EU, agencies which deal with the management of rivers and floodplains have
to consider a variety of management goals provided by the sectoral legal frameworks, as the EU
Water Framework Directive, EU Flood Risk Directive, EU Habitats Directive, national legislation on
hydropower use, etc.
In many cases, implementation of these legal frameworks will result in
potential conflicts. Such conflicts are often due to an insufficiently wide range of alternatives taken
into account, and due to consolidated positions of stakeholder groups, that are not based on an
exhaustive assessment of the effects of each alternative.
The adoption of an evaluation approach
based on the concept of ES may help to identify “hidden” benefits of some management actions, as
well as synergies between the objectives of different stakeholders, ultimately reducing the conflict.
In order to establish the linkages between management actions and ES, we below define a set of
standard management or structural measures aiming at the (ecological) restoration of rivers.
Most hydromorphological restoration projects usually involve at least one of these measures. These are
usually based on removing, mitigating, or compensating a pre-existing pressure.
As the logical connections between a restoration action and a given ES are usually the same (though with opposite
“direction”) that can be established between the corresponding pressure/alteration action and the
same ES, we associated to each restoration measure the corresponding alteration.
