Irish LEADER support for the Water Biodiversity Training Programme for the Duhallow Communities project acted as a catalyst in helping local authorities design popular and productive environmental actions attracting larger sources of funding.

LEADER is good at building social capacity in rural community organisations that can be directed to develop and maintain essential environmental resources like water. An excellent example of this is Ireland’s Water Biodiversity Training Programme for Duhallow Communities, which acted as a catalyst in helping local authorities design popular and productive environmental actions attracting larger sources of funding.

Being part of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), LEADER is fully capable of supporting the European Green Deal and Local Action Groups (LAGs) in providing a range of environmental improvement interventions through their cooperation activities. LEADER’s well-established collective approaches provide advantages from a bottom-up ability to foster dialogue between multiple actors, often with different perspectives. Results allow important environmental objectives to be debated and agreed in inclusive manners. By doing so, synergies and trade-offs between different objectives can be identified and action agreed to maximise those synergies and minimise the trade-offs for local authorities.