Newsletter July 2020

With its new Water Manifesto, the European Water Association (EWA) draws attention to current challenges for water management in Europe and makes proposals for sustainable solutions to these. EWA calls upon civil society and all relevant stakeholders to contribute to implementation of such solutions, and EWA encourages the permanent dialogue between the decision makers and the national and regional authorities.

Responsible for the development of the EWA Water Manifesto 2020 is the EWA European Policy Committee, which has experts from numerous European countries. Chair of the EWA European Policy Committee is Wendy Francken from VLARIO in Belgium, who in this short video presents the new Water Manifesto:

 ➤ Video (duration 2:41 min.) with short presentation of the EWA Water Manifesto 2020.

The EWA Water Manifesto 2020 concentrates on the following four themes:

➀ Nature-based Solutions to Respond to Climate Change

➁ Financing Investment in Water Services

➂ Asset Management and Digitalisation of Water Infrastructure

➃ Boosting Water Demand Management

 ➤ Download: You find the new EWA Water Manifesto here.

The improvement of agricultural water management, however, can only be achieved through synergetic plans of action and effective choices by all stakeholders. National policy strategies and improved farming practices are both essential to overcome challenges posed by drought and desertification and to change public attitudes in order to “produce more with less”.

A series of four publications has been produced in the framework of the “Strengthening agricultural water efficiency and productivity at the African and global level” project, to present results and lessons learned from the application of comprehensive approaches and real-term implementation of water productivity and water use efficiency practices in Burkina Faso, Morocco and Uganda.

Taking into account the need to address all relevant stakeholders, a series of publications that includes two field guides for farmers and practitioners, as well as two policy guides for institutional actors and decision makers were developed.

Read the publications:

• Field guide to improve crop water productivity in small-scale agriculture
• Field guide to improve water use efficiency in small-scale agriculture
• Policy guide to improve water productivity in small-scale agriculture
• Policy guide to improve water use efficiency in small-scale agriculture

Visit he Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations website

ERA-LEARN has published a new Report on Inclusiveness in European R&I Partnership Programme.

The report presents the results of an ERA-LEARN survey on inclusiveness targeted at H2020 ERA-NET Cofund and EJP Cofund Programme coordinators. The goal of the survey was to collect information on measures introduced by H2020 ERA-NET Cofund and EJP Cofund Programmes, in order to enhance the participation of the ‘Widening Countries’.

To sum up, the survey results demonstrate that participation of Widening Countries in EU Partnerships is limited and actions are needed to strengthen it. However, only by introducing a systematic portfolio of Widening measures throughout the entire Programme cycle can we obtain the expected outcome, namely a larger number of funded projects including organisations from Widening Countries.

You can download the Report on Inclusiveness in European R&I Partnership Programme here

In the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) TELECOM in September 2020 the WHOW project will be launched. The project has aims to develop a framework to foster the creation of a large data ecosystem on water consumption and quality, health parameters, and dissemination of diseases to be reused for advanced analysis and development of innovative services.   WHOW addresses the generation of cross-border and cross-domain services also re-using information made discoverable through the European Data Portal. In particular, the project will develop the first European knowledge graph on water consumption and pollution, with data sources coming from different administrative levels; and will correlate this environmental data to health data on disease dissemination by integrating datasets of Italy and other EU countries, making them available for anyone for successive reuse. While the cross-border use case will focus on water-related datasets, the cross-domain use case will be implemented by the Italian partners correlating health data to environmental data.  WHOW will target use cases in the creation of the knowledge graph, identifying and integrating the relevant set of indicators for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and will embrace a co-creation program where interested stakeholders and users will be engaged from the initial phases of the project.  The Celeris Advisory Ltd (Irland) is leader of the project and the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA),  the Italian National Research Council – Institute of cognitive sciences and technologies (CNR-ISTC) and the ARIA S.p.A. (Regional company for Innovation and Purchases of the Lombardia Region) are the partners.

The 2020 edition of the World Water Development Report (WWDR 2020) entitled ‘Water and Climate Change’ aims at helping the water community to tackle the challenges of climate change and informing the climate change community about the opportunities that improved water management offers in terms of adaptation and mitigation.

The 2020 United Nations World Water Development Report focuses on the challenges, opportunities and potential responses to climate change, in terms of adaptation, mitigation and improved resilience that can be addressed through improving water management.
Combining climate change adaptation and mitigation, through water, is a win-win proposal, improving the provision of water supply and sanitation services and combating both the causes and impacts of climate change, including disaster risk reduction.

Members of Aqua Publica Europea are taking part in research efforts throughout Europe to detect and trace SARS-CoV-2 in waste water, as a potential tool for an early warning system and public health decision-making. 

• EMASESA (Seville, Spain) is defining processes and network sectorisation to localise information and defining an action protocol as part of waste water safety planning.
• Eau de Paris(Paris, France) participated in a quantitative research conducted through the lockdown period that found a parallel between the quantity of virus RNA in waste water and the evolution of clinical cases.
• PROMEDIO(Badajoz, Spain) is adapting tools designed for larger cities to its own on-the-ground reality: smaller municipalities, rural areas, disperse populations.
• BCASA (Barcelona, Spain), is participating in EU-funded research projects that are incorporating activities related to COVID-19
• Many Italian operators are involved with the National Health Institute’s nationwide project
• Scottish Water, Budapest WaterWorks, Irish Water, Aguas de Cádiz, HAMBURG WASSER, and others collect and provide samples to support wider research initiatives.  

Vulnerability of shallow groundwater resources to deep sub-surface energy-related activities (VoGERA) will gather scientific evidence to investigate the relationship between industrial activity in the deep sub-surface and shallow groundwater resources, in a European context. The project will consider the possible impacts on groundwater from a range of sub-surface energy activities (geothermal energy, unconventional oil and gas exploitation, sub-surface storage and disposal of wastes) in a consistent manner. An approach to evaluating groundwater vulnerability from sub-surface activities that can be applied across Europe will be developed using this evidence, and the in-depth understanding gained will be used to improve awareness of these issues with decision makers and the public. This will aid better sub-surface spatial planning and policy development for deep sub-surface energy-related activities in relation to groundwater, thus allowing for the simultaneous protection of groundwater for future generations whilst recognizing the need for economic development. A strong link with stakeholders will ensure an approach that is fit-for-purpose and has maximum impact. Conceptual models of shallow groundwater vulnerability to deep sub-surface energy activities will be developed using existing data and information and experience of GeoERA partners and from previous projects, and will be validated at a number of pilot study sites. These will be in different hydrogeological settings across Europe and will use a range of physical, chemical, isotopic and intercalibrated geophysical methods to identify and characterize contaminant pathway properties and their influence on groundwater vulnerability.