Transition lab Hjälmaren

Project partners: Hjälmarsamarbetet, Örebro Municipality, Eskilstuna Municipality, Katrineholm Municipality, Örebro County Administrative Board, Örebro University, Hjälmarens vattenvårdsförbund, Örebro Airport

Grant: SEK 13 488 673

Project duration: 2025-11-15 to 2028-10-14

Contact person: Frans Prenkert, Örebro University

Purpose and objectives

The project aims to establish a geographical transition lab around lake Hjälmaren. The transition lab takes a landscape and systems perspective on the complex challenges of the lake today and in the future. This is done by building organizational capacity of participating organizations, ensuring local policy coherence and by developing a common approach to long-term water environment work at both strategic and operational levels. Specifically, the focus of the transition lab is to develop and implement new technologies to reduce the spread of micropollutants, develop and implement methods to manage both high and low water flows at the landscape level to protect both buildings, agricultural land, drinking water supplies and ecosystems. The transition lab also aims to build, disseminate and implement the knowledge and systems perspective needed to address the complex challenges of the lake Hjälmaren.

Expected impacts and results

The project is expected to result in an established transition lab and implemented techniques to reduce the spread of micropollutants and a municipality- and county-wide approach to managing the high and low flows that are predicted to become more common with climate change. The challenges of the lake Hjälmaren are complex and integrated into each other, which is why the project builds and implements knowledge and a system perspective in participating organizations. The project thus contributes in several ways to the program’s mission and does this with a landscape perspective where, for example, policy development is a prerequisite for managing low and high flows, which in turn is a prerequisite for, among other things, counteracting collapsing ecosystems due to the accelerating warming of lake Hjälmaren, which also affects drinking water supplies and so on.

Planned approach and implementation

The transition lab is formed within the framework of the Hjälmarsamarbetet coordination organization. An operational transition team with representatives of the member organizations is created and builds and implements the necessary system perspective, among other things based on results from other work packages. Each work package in the project has its own time and implementation plans that vary depending on the subject matter.

The text on this page was written by the project team. The content has not been reviewed by our editors.