End of May 2021, the LimnoScenES-team and stakeholders of lake Dümmer met virtually for their 3^rd workshop. You can find the short summary of the results in German here: LimnoScenES_3rd Workshop 2021-05-28_Ergebnisse.

The workshop built upon the results of the preceding project workshops at lake Dümmer. During the first, held in November 2019, the participants jointly created a vision for the lake in the year 2050. The second workshop in September 2020 outlined a possible path towards this vision and identified important milestones and action steps. In a follow-up discussion round in January 2021, we discussed the workshop’s results further. Following this line, the third workshop aimed at concretizing next steps and creating the infracture necessary to continue the transformation of lake Dümmer and its catchment.

For this objective, 11 stakeholders and 5 team members came together in a video conference that lasted 2.5 hours. The stakeholders represented various sectors including environmental conservation and monitoring, water management, rural development, and water sports.

During the discussion it became clear that an infrastructure to guide the transformation is already in place. However, they identified the following needs to support a transformation of the region, including

• Prioritizing the set of planned measures in regard to their feasibility and range of applicability (spatially and temporally);
• Making use of synergies between as yet mostly separated sectors (e.g. tourism, agriculture, nature conservation, …);
• Setting up ‘round tables’ to bring stakeholders together (e.g. policy makers and practitioners); and
• Communicating successes and implemented steps internally and to the wider public (e.g. via newspaper articles, websites, presenting the LimnoScenes project at the ‘Dümmerforum’, …).

The stakeholders expressed their wish to continue joint meetings as part of the LimnoScenES project to facilitate the transformational process. They stressed the importance to include all relevant stakeholders in the upcoming meetings, in particular relating to representatives from the agricultural sector, who were not able to attend the third workshop.

The workshop team will now evaluate the results and determine how LimnoScenES could best support and assist the realization of the stakeholders’ ideas and plans for a transformation of lake Dümmer and its catchment.