Community Engagement

Community actions took place across the Arney, Blackwater and the Finn, where the project supported innovative approaches to Knowledge Exchange. These brought together those with long term visions of sustainable catchment management, whilst supporting projects that included different stakeholders such as farmers, anglers, community groups and local schools. This bottom-up approach took into account local needs, knowledge, experience, and instilled a further commitment of local communities to the protection of their local river systems, catchment and associated water bodies.

One of the main deliverables of the CatchmentCARE Project was to therefore to design, develop and deliver a bespoke ‘Community Incentive Scheme’ (CIS) which would support local capacity building and knowledge exchange. The scheme supported cross border ‘catchment improvement projects’ in the Arney; Blackwater and Finn catchments. 37 separate projects were successfully funded over two phases of the CIS.

Examples of the kind of projects supported in the CIS included practical water-quality improvement projects, education and awareness campaigns, access to loughs and rivers, volunteer training, specialised equipment, community river trails, bio-blitzes, citizen science projects and interpretation and signage.

To learn more about all of these projects, please click on the link below to download the 'CIS Legacy Document'