Dnipro River Integrated Vision

The Dnipro River is like a golden thread connecting the past with the present and with the future. The Dnipro River is about life: the life of microorganisms, plants, and animals, and the life of humans. But also the lives of societies, nations, and countries. And at the same time, the Dnipro River is about risks and threats. It is both under threat and a threat itself, putting all life that depends on it at risk. It is weaponised by the war, it is put in danger as a result of the war, and at the same time, it is a necessary and unavoidable element for liberation and peace.
In the summer of 2023, Greenpeace and Ro3kvit teamed up to unite experience and expertise to develop strategies and visions that would help address the existing challenges and reveal the unused potential of the Dnipro River. What can be better than the country’s largest river in demonstrating how a green, climate-friendly future for Ukraine can be developed?
Our Dnipro River Integrated vision connects different topics, or as we like to call them – layers. By connecting and superposing the various social, cultural, natural, economic and other layers, we are able to expose how different configurations of interventions lead to positive or negative impacts. In some places, layers efficiently coexist, on other instances, conflicts seem inevitable, requiring us to rethink the complex network and find alternative solutions. Usually, the best-integrated design tries to include as many different layers and goals as possible without harming other outcomes significantly. This is what we try to achieve for the Dnipro River. What makes this even more complex is scale. Working with the Dnipro River inevitably requires connecting different scales, from national to regional and to local dimensions, as well as from the river to the basin – from water to land.
Ultimately, what this report attempts to do is also to bridge the gap between those scales, but also between people. By presenting the various topics, we aim to reveal these diverse perspectives of looking at the Dnipro River, encouraging the different actors and stakeholders to try to understand each other better, in order to reach better solutions together.

Team: Fulco Treffers, Svitlana Usychenko, Antoine Korchagin, Vaagn Mnatsakanian, Angel Bondov, Hristo Panchev, Tim Van Epp, Niall Buckley

Partners

The Dnipro River is so large and important to so many individuals, communities, enterprises, sectors, that finding ways in which all its various dimensions and interests are adequately represented is a huge challenge. The scope of our research inevitably made it difficult to capture all the different dimensions of the Dnipro River. Some of it had been deducted and analysed from articles, reports, books and other publications.For those topics which seemed most important to us, however, we had an opportunity to interact more closely with various stakeholders to gain a more in-depth understanding of their views, opinions, expertise about the Dnipro River. We especially would like to mention here the main partners Ecoaction, the State Agency of Water Resources of Ukraine and the Kremenchuk municipality.
Special thanks to Ro3kvit’s partners: the Kharkiv School of Architecture and the Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group of the American Planning Association, that provided ideas and input during the process. And last but not least, the supporters of Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe who made this project possible.