The workshop, organized by UNECE with the support of the Italian Ministry of Environment, Land, and Sea, was the closing event of the project “Drina Nexus Follow-up”. The workshop convened policy makers, power companies/utilities, financial institutions, international organizations and civil society representatives from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia, around a high-level dialogue in inter-sectoral and transboundary cooperation. Participants discussed concrete opportunities to advance sustainable development in the Drina River Basin, notably though better coordination of policies and investments across sectors and countries. This meant addressing the most pressing trade-offs and building strategic synergies across the areas of energy generation, land management, water use, and environment protection.
This final workshop aimed at, firstly, presenting to the beneficiary countries of the project results and, secondly, providing an occasion for a high-level dialogue around two key questions that are decisive for the future of the water- energy-environment nexus in the basin: How to better balance development (considering energy generation, land management and water use) and sustainability (including the environment) in the basin? How investment can help to more effectively strike that balance?
The following activities were worked on with the support of the Drina Follow Up Project (2018-2019), addressing selected resource management and environmental challenges:
1. Review of monitoring and information exchange in transboundary cooperation, identification of needs. Analysis of monitoring procedures and mapping of guidance;
2. Identification of areas with a deficit and a surplus of sediment, producing an erosion map, as well as proposing zones for surveillance and priority actions;
3. Desk study of flow regulation and environmental flows, review of the situation in the Drina, identifying examples of formal cooperation arrangements and good practices, and determining future formalization options for improving the flow regime;
4. National multi-stakeholder dialogues to trouble-shoot on renewable energy investment and its environmental sustainability issues.