Water JPI Governing Board
The Water JPI held its 19th Governing Board meeting on 23-24 November 2021 with the objective to agree on a two-year action plan for 2022-2023 and on a funding model for future years. The online meeting also facilitated discussion around the Task Forces set up to support progress on the following activities: Alignment, Interactions with Horizon Europe and Research Infrastructures.
The meeting was an opportunity to update Governing Board members on ongoing activities. In particular, the development of the strategy for International Cooperation and the impact assessment of the Water JPI that are currently carried out as part of the IC4WATER CSA activities.
In Summer 2021, a panel of seven high level experts was recruited to assess the added value and the global impact (both scientific and societal) of the Water JPI activities and actions to the water community. The panel was in charge of reviewing the main documents and data describing the Water JPI aims and actions (SRIA, Implementation plan, maturity maps, narratives, survey results), carrying out interviews of key persons involved in Water JPI, providing an independent review of the performance of Water JPI to date and recommendations for improvement, and formulating lessons learned for future. The results of the impact assessment will be presented in the Global Impact Assessment report launch event in Spring 2022.
The strategy for International Cooperation has been built on the work achieved for these past years: proceedings of previous workshops on International cooperation, outputs from previous stages (e.g. Water JPI Vision 2030, SRIA 2025, Water JPI & FACCE-JPI common vision) and activities developed under the CSA IC4WATER (e.g. Private-Public-Partnership workshops or Regional Cooperation workshops). Moreover, the outcomes of the Cairo Water Week workshop organised in October 2021 with PRIMA and the Egyptian academy of Science allowed to bring new insights on Social Innovation and Water governance.
An internal workshop scheduled in February 2022 will gather Water JPI Governing Board members to discuss this proposed strategy for International cooperation. The final document will be presented at an event to be held in spring 2022. This event will gather, amongst other participants, representatives of the future Co-funded EU partnership Water4All, as the Water JPI’s international cooperation strategy report aims to feed Water4All’s internationalisation activities.