The thematic conference, promoted by the PRIMA NATMed project, was held on 11 February in Seville under the title ‘Nature-based solutions: water management and reuse in the context of drought.’
The Spanish partner CTA shared the progress of the project with representatives of other SUDOE 21-27 initiatives, such as i-REWATER and TARGET.
According to the IUCM Academy, ‘Nature-based solutions (NBS) are actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural and modified ecosystems, addressing societal challenges in an effective and adaptive way, simultaneously benefiting people and the environment’. With this clarification, the co-creation workshop ‘Nature-based solutions: water management and reuse in the context of drought,’ held on 11 February at the headquarters of the Consejería de Agricultura Consejería de Agricultura, Pesca, Agua y Desarrollo Rural de la Junta de Andalucía (Seville), began.
The seminar, organised by the NatMed project, an initiative funded by the European regional development programme PRIMA, aimed to address the efficiency of the different SBN methods implemented (lessons learnt, scalability, and replication), discuss their challenges, and exchange results and best practices between initiatives developed within the same research framework.
Due to its research, SOLLAGUA was selected for the panel of presentations. Carlos García Delgado (CTA) presented the main lines of action of the initiative, the entities that promote it, the area of impact, and the state of research. In addition, like the rest of those present, he emphasised the need to continue promoting this type of meeting to strengthen collaboration among the different regional actors (public and private) interested in applying sustainable management strategies to address the major challenges related to water scarcity in southern Europe.
Main conclusions
Some of the conclusions were:
- SBNs can play a key role in water management, but they need a more supportive and coherent administrative framework; earlier integration into land use planning and clearer roadmaps and implementation pathways would facilitate their development and scalability.
- The benefits and costs of such technologies need to be better explained to policy makers, managers, end-users and citizens. Continued support for Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI), a tool to foster innovation in the public sector through the procurement of innovative solutions or solutions under development, is crucial.
The event was also attended by representatives of other projects such as Life Matrix, Cardimed Project, Farms4Climate, i-REWATER and TARGET, and companies such as BIOAZUL SL and todobarro, among others.
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