Water4All & Water JPI: what is the difference?

As you may know, a new initiative to tackle global water challenges has taken shape in 2022, the European partnership Water4All – water security for the planet (www.water4all-partnership.eu). This partnership is co-funded by the European Union in the framework of Horizon Europe and built on the experience and expertise of the Water JPI.

Thanks to more than 10 years of expertise, the Water JPI gained a lot of experience in the management of a large consortium, in the launch of calls for research and innovation projects and for the valorisation of scientific knowledge in the field of water. The Water JPI was thus involved in the setting-up of the Water4All work programme and actively participated in the development of the Water4All’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (Water4All SRIA, 2022), a reference document setting guiding principles and identifying policy-relevant research priorities for the future. The Water JPI experience enabled the new partnership to avoid some problems encountered by Water JPI in its early days, and to organise itself to think bigger! 

A continuity between the activities implemented over the past years within the Water JPI is ensured thanks to the sharing of best available practices, lessons learned and recommendations for the development of the Water4All’s communication, dissemination and exploitation strategy. The work initiated by the Water JPI for the development of tools and online platforms for the collection and access of open data or for promoting the access to Research and Infrastructures will also be used as a baseline by Water4All for better communicating water-related knowledge and data. Similarly, the outcomes of the mapping exercise carried out in the framework of the Water JPI and its strategy for international cooperation for 2022-2027 (Water JPI International Cooperation Strategy[1], 2022) were also considered as reference documents to feed the International Cooperation Strategy of the Watert4All partnership.  

If both initiatives are supporting water research and innovation, Water4All is more ambitious in order to achieve the overall goal of securing water for all. Whereas the Water JPI brings together 20-member countries, represented mainly by research and innovation funders, Water4All is gathering 31-member countries from Europe and beyond and is encompassing more than 80 partners from the whole water Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) chain, including representatives from academia, research and innovation funders, water management authorities and water associations.  

To meet its ambition, the Water4All’s scope of action is larger than the one of the Water JPI, including multi-national and cross-sectoral activities from physical and biological sciences to human and social sciences, and adopting a systemic approach from the source to the sea. In the light of Water JPI actions fostering the alignment of national and regional water-related programmes and strengthening water RDI collaboration at international level, Water4All will be supporting and promoting the demonstration and access to market of innovative solutions, providing tools for water management, fostering capacity development of policy-makers, stakeholders and citizens, and designing and implementing approaches to enable participatory development of innovation. 

To summarize, Water4All has a larger consortium and an ambition that goes well beyond fundamental research. Partners come from different types of organisations including national research and innovation funders, researchers, end users, policy makers, associations, networks and economics actors. The articulation of those two initiatives and their complementarities will, thanks to the Water JPI Action Plan aimed at valorising the results of research projects, enable Water4All to take over the funding of research projects. This complementarity will allow the development of new joint activities and instruments to ultimately meet the objectives of the Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals.
 

[1] http://www.waterjpi.eu/international-cooperation/international-cooperation-strategy

http://www.waterjpi.eu/international-cooperation/cooperation-beyond-europe-1