Water JPI Advisory Boards meeting
Water JPI Advisory Boards meeting - 24 March 2021
The 24th of March 2021, Water JPI Advisory Boards - composed of a Scientific and Technological Board (STB) and a Stakeholders Advisory Group (SAG) - met to discuss in interactive sessions (i) the candidate Horizon Europe’s co-funded Partnership dedicated to water security challenges, Water4All, and (ii) Water JPI’s activities on International cooperation.
While the Water JPI STB is composed of individuals nominated for their expertise, our SAG gathers stakeholders’ institutions/organisations. On the 24th march, the SAG welcomed two new members:
- ERRIN, the European Regions Research and Innovation Network represented by its director
- IHE Delft, the Institute for Water Education represented by its rector
The interactive session about the Water4All Partnership aimed at discussing its monitoring and key performance indicators (KPIs), which is a requirement from the European Commission with the aim of tracking the success of the project. The monitoring template has the overarching structure decomposed in General Objectives, Specific Objectives and Operational Objectives. Identifying relevant qualitative and quantitative KPIs related to this structure is crucial to allow Water4All to deliver concrete results throughout the annual implementation plans over the next seven years. The acting Coordinator of Water4All, Olivier Bouc, moderated the session. The discussion was very fruitful and amongst the points brought by the Advisory Boards, they identified specific outputs that Water4All should deliver such as, the involvement of stakeholders in the co-design of solutions, and the showcase of innovation solutions with high-level of technology readiness (TRL). Equally, the Advisory Boards zoomed on the outputs that could enable a link with policy by influencing for example the use of PFA or chemicals (biomonitoring). As for the quantitative KPIs, the talent growth and capacity-building, the usual figures of call for proposals (number of proposals, number of participants, legal status of coordinators, legal status of participating organizations, national funding allocated, etc.) were proposed. For the qualitative KPIs, the Advisory Boards focused on the impact onto the policies across the subthemes. They recommended that a more efficient communication and dissemination should be delivered to showcase the outputs. More generally, the members of the Advisory Boards proposed to come back to the Water JPI Secretariat with further ideas regarding the overarching structure and KPIs of Water4All.
The interactive session about International cooperation was moderated by Miguel Angel Gilarranz, Water JPI vice-Chair. The recommendations done by the participants to the two last workshops were presented in the introduction: from the Danube Region workshop, it came out that a “Working Group on Transboundary rivers” should be developed under the umbrella of the Water JPI (workshop proceedings are available here). From the latest workshop on Public-Private Partnerships and scaling up of Water JPI activities, held in January 2021, several recommendations came out, one of which was the launch of a working group on water governance (workshop proceedings are available here). Consequently, the aim of this interactive session was to delineate the objectives / themes / members to create a group dealing with transboundary cooperation. This group should gather experts in transboundary river basin management, relevant stakeholders and end-users. Members of this group would include for example Hydropower companies, Dam owners, Governmental water management bodies, Representatives from agriculture, water supply organisations, transport, fishery, and NGOs.
Our Advisory Boards recommended that the Water JPI should link with existing initiatives and projects to avoid duplication and working in silos. The Water JPI could be the platform to bridge the gap and link these initiatives and projects. A funding model for this working group should be foreseen, such as for instance, membership fees that will also strengthen the acceptability of the outputs by the different partners participating in this group.