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The WATERMINING project aims to bring solutions to improve the circularity of water treatment and the resulting by-products of these processes. Achieving a deep understanding of the barriers potentially hindering the development of circular water solutions is crucial to design policies that enable the deployment of these techniques. To do this, the WATERMINING project organizes Communities of Practice (CoPs), where stakeholders from the WATERMINING case study projects analysed these market barriers and proposal (policy) measures to clear these. CoPs in the case studies of Lampedusa in Italy and Almería in Spain focused on sea water desalination. The case studies of Faro-Olhão in Portugal, Larnaca in Cyprus and La Llagosta in Spain have been discussed by CoP stakeholders in terms of barriers in circular urban wastewater treatment. The CoP in the Netherlands focused on circular industrial waste water treatment at the Westlake plant at Rotterdam. The barriers defined by the stakeholders in the CoPs were discussed by the WATERMINING partners at the consortium meeting in Palermo (Italy, September 2022), and presented at the WATERMINING Market and Policy workshop in Brussels (Belgium, February 2023). Addressing the three above-mentioned categories of circular water solutions, common barriers identified across all WATERMINING’s case studies are the following. First, stakeholders report a lack of incentives to implement circular solutions, as mainstream linear practices are generally cheaper. This could be addressed by de-encouraging linear techniques by making the disposal of their byproducts (such as brine) more expensive. Another solution could be to provide added value to circular solutions through the monetization of their additional products and services. Subsidies can support in lowering production costs or prices of materials recovered from sea- and wastewater treatment to level the playing field with conventionaly derived material. Another commonly mentioned barrier is the difficulty to introduce products obtained from circular water treatment in the market, both because of a lack of public acceptance and legal constraints stemming from products being regarded as waste. Information campaigns and the revision of current regulatory frameworks to allow these products entering the market would expand the revenue sources from these techniques and improve the circularity of the system. Standardising the circular water treatment technologies in the market could support this, whereby best available techniques reference documents of the EU (BREFs) could be an effective instrument, especially when tapping into an ongoing BREF writing or updating process. Across the case studies and replication studies it has been mentioned that current legislation in case study countries exclude ‘watermined’ products from food and/or other applications. Criteria for endof-waste status of ‘watermined’ products, which would determine whether a product, such as Kaumera which is produced from urban wastewater treatment, is eligible as a fertiliser in agriculture, are usually determined at the level of the EU, but Member States could interpret these more stringently (Member State-level criteria cannot be weaker than the EU-level ones). In this respect it has been recommended to enhance knowledge exchange across Member States, e.g., by creating an EU-based unit (or competencies within an existing unit) to promote cooperation among EU Member States and regional authorities concerning the production, sale and use of products recovered from wastewater treatment. Another common perception stakeholders report is the widespread conservatism in the water sector. Water treatment actors traditionally have a focus on purifying water and supplying this to the market. Generating products from waste streams is often something that market actors are less familiar with. Among other solutions, the ‘Dutch model’ has been recommended as a way to create national centres for the development of knowledge and technology for water management, which would serve as an R&D accelerator.

This paper elaborates on potential linkages between TNAs and NDCs. TNAs have been conducted by developing countries since 2001 as a participatory process to prioritize technologies for mitigation and adaptation within countries’ national sustainable development contexts. Around 15 years after conducting the first TNA, its bottom-up paradigm was reflected in the Paris Agreement and the concept of NDCs. In their NDCs countries determine actions within their national contexts that contribute to the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 °C and preferably below 1.5 °C. There are many potential interlinkages between TNAs and NDCs, as noted in earlier papers by the TEC. For example, TEC (2018) compares possible NDC design and implementation steps with those in the TNA guidance, concluding that outputs from one process could be used as inputs for the other. Recent synthesis reports on NDCs and TNAs highlight that the processes refer to each other in several ways. Most recent TNAs use a country’s NDC as a starting point for the analysis.

This paper explores innovative approaches to stimulating the uptake of existing climate technologies for mitigation and adaptation. Such innovations can be identified in the following areas: how technology options are selected by countries (i.e. as part of low-emission and climate-resilient pathways); how stakeholder views and practitioner knowledge, as well as their preferences, are solicited in climate technology planning; what financial innovations exist for enhancing funding of technology projects and programmes; and what are viable ways of enhancing private sector engagement and incubators.

The Dutch Climate Agreement lists an ambition for an additional CO2-sequestration of 0.4-0.8 Mton/yr in forest and nature in 2030. Experience with measures in climate smart forest and nature area management is necessary to realise this ambition. Therefore, the pilots of the Climate Envelope Forest, Nature and Wood have been carried out in 2018 and 2019. The aim of the pilots is to fill an online ‘Toolbox’, where managers, policy makers and other parties involved can find information on climate smart forest and nature area management. Furthermore, the experiences from the pilots form the basis for the sector ‘Landuse’ within the Dutch Climate Agreement, identifying and bridging existing knowledge gaps. This report describes results and experiences from the pilots of the climate envelopes and gives a future perspective. In het Klimaatakkoord is de ambitie opgenomen voor een additionele CO2-vastlegging van 0.4-0.8 Mton/jr in bos en natuur in 2030. Om deze ambitie te realiseren, is ervaring nodig met maatregelen voor klimaatslim bos- en natuurbeheer. Daarom zijn in de jaren 2018 en 2019 pilots van de klimaatenvelop Bos, Natuur en Hout uitgevoerd. Het doel van de pilots is om een online ‘Gereedschapskist’ te vullen, waarin beheerders, beleidsmakers en andere betrokkenen informatie voor klimaatslim bos- en natuurbeheer kunnen vinden. Tevens leggen de ervaringen uit de pilots een basis voor de Klimaattafel ‘Landgebruik’ binnen het Klimaatakkoord, zodat kennishiaten geduid en deels gevuld kunnen worden. Dit rapport beschrijft de resultaten en ervaringen van de pilots van de klimaatenveloppen en geeft een toekomstperspectief.

The 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C once again highlighted (and with increased urgency) the benefits of immediate, extreme decarbonisation efforts in order to minimise the negative impacts of climate change. Achieving such demanding global targets requires concerted national, subnational, and local efforts. In combination, these efforts result in transition pathways. Implementation of the technologies and policies at the heart of such pathways is often considered as inherently positive, thus the immediate risks associated with the pathway are the barriers faced on implementation. However, successful implementation of a climate change mitigation policy may also have potentially negative consequences. On either side a host of more abstract uncertainties increase the difficultly of decision making. In this chapter, we provide a synthesis of eleven low-carbon transition pathways from across the globe and explore the risks and uncertainties associated with them. We structure our discussion around three nested dimensions present in all pathways: technological innovations implemented in a local context; policy mixes promoting these technologies; and society, where social-economic priorities may lead individuals and communities to support or oppose the low-carbon pathway. Across these themes, we also explore the meaning of scale and stakeholders’ perceptions of time in low-carbon pathways. Our discussion reflects the complexity associated with assessing risks in contested settings. While many of these risks are context specific and reflect a broad range of stakeholder perspectives, common risks are found across the case studies, regardless of the local context, the technology promoted, and the policy mix implemented.