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deals - mostly relying for their food requirements from the global markets – actually try to
externalize their food demand buying land in foreign countries. The land deals represent a new form
of geopolitical control over natural resources that increase regional competition, contribute to
water and land depletion in the countries that host the land investments.
Why this emphasis?
Socio-economic issues directly affect (or are affected by) water food nexus in Mediterranean countries.
Based on a previous extensive stakeholders’ analysis (MedSpring), Prima program could address the
following problems: 1) the evidence highlight a lack of adequate information on the impact of alternative
policy options as a major constraint towards deepening the economic reforms for water and food in SEMCs.
2) such reforms continue to be externally designed without adequate economic analyses and hence lack of
local ownership. 3) innovative indicators on food-water nexus should be developed, considering both
national and local peculiarities in order to produce a useful and innovative body of
knowledge and analyses,
capable of helping political and economic decision makers in a geographic perspective. 4) the need to
enhance research complementarities. Greater attention should be paid to technical options for improving
efficiency and promoting food and water security, as well as to policy options which ensure cross-institutional
collaboration. 5) the current economic-financial crisis and socio-political uprising in the Mediterranean
Region need to encourage the creation of synergies based on common rules and objectives and the adoption
of long-term strategies.
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SUCCESS STORIES
Project title
AquaStress - Mitigation of Water Stress through new Approaches to Integrating Management, Technical, Economic and
Institutional Instruments
Partners
EU: Italy, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Greece, Germany, France, Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Poland,
Bulgaria, Cyprus,
Mediterranean Partner Countries: Tunisia, Morocco
Objectives of the action
AquaStress attempts to develop stakeholder driven, European scale, comprehensive multisectoral, integrated (institutional, socio-
economic, technical) approaches for the diagnosis and mitigation of water stress. AquaStress empowers actors at different levels
of involvement, at different stages of the planning process, and working at different spatial scales, to mitigate water stress.
AquaStress leads to prioritized actions that allow gradual improvement and flexibility to adapt to change in global systems,
knowledge, technology and society.
AquaStress intends to deliver guidelines to implement integrated water stress mitigation options at local, regional and European
scale. AquaStress delivers a "culture change" in approaches to water stress. It will achieve this through:
Major advances in the understanding, effectiveness and empowerment of stakeholder driven participatory decision making in
water management
at local and regional scales;
New insights into the pressures and drivers of water stress in different regions of the EU, and in the regional aggregation of
stakeholder
based decisions;
New assessments of diverse policies, institutions and cultural factors as causes and remedies to water stress, leading to new
measures of the effectiveness and side effects of
mitigation options;
New approaches to the integration of diverse multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary expertise for participatory vulnerability
assessment
and adaptive planning;
The development of IT knowledge management tools to support this new management
approach;
Identifying areas where new technologies would have the most impact
in mitigating water stress;
A culture change in the European approach to water management, from centralist infrastructure dependency towards a
distributed, bottom-up, adaptive integrated systems approach.
Results and impacts
A major EU project, Aquastress, has completed an initiative to tackle water stress. Not just a matter of technological
developments, water shortage must be overcome using integrated water management strategies and sound decision making.
Relieving water stress © Thinkstock
Water supply is shrinking with ballooning population size, increase in consumption of water-thirsty production of meat and
vegetables, demands from industry and potential effects of global warming. Efficient management of water supplies is therefore
becoming increasingly important.
Under the Sixth Framework Program (FP6), Aquastress aimed to mitigate water stress problems using a combination of
development of interdisciplinary tools and guidance documents. Deliverables would enable a range of stakeholders and actors at
different levels of involvement to reduce water stress.
Aquastress partners come from both academic and industrial backgrounds with skills ranging from operational management to
socioeconomic and environmental domains. A total of 35 partners from 17 countries made up the consortium.
The project adopted a case study approach that was stakeholder-driven. The order of operation was divided into three phases –
characterization of reference sites and their water stress problems, identification of solutions, and finally testing of the different
solutions according to stakeholder expectations.
Available on the project website at http://www.aquastress.net/index.php are the many deliverables produced by Aquastress
during the project term. These include documents such as 'Guidance on water stress mitigation', a case study booklet and
instruments for water saving in agriculture and industry together with related economics. Moreover, the Aquastress integrated
solution support system helps interested parties to understand water stress from an integrated perspective and to find adaptable
solutions to water stress. There is also a comprehensive list of factsheets.
The Aquastress website is in its entirety freely available to all and provides maximum dissemination of the many project
publications. As such, the information is accessible by
scientists, stakeholders and the general public to publicize solutions for this
global concern.