PRESS RELEASE - Toward a More Resilient Water Supply: RECREATE Project Launches in Manresa
Communities across Europe are facing the impacts of climate change, many of which relate to stress on water supplies, including unprecedented droughts. To face these increasing impacts, the new Horizon Europe-funded project RECREATE is building a more resilient water supply through Alternative Water Resources (AWR). Launched earlier this year in Manresa, Spain at the offices of EURECAT, RECREATE represents a new opportunity for a water supply better adapted to today’s challenges.
RECREATE is engaging directly with four different case studies: North Holland (Netherlands), Kalundborg (Denmark), Syros (Greece), and the Costa Brava (Spain). Each brings a different bio-geographical and climate perspective to the work of RECREATE, offering the chance to explore different alternative water resources and practices ranging from rainwater harvesting, water reclamation, brackish groundwater, to desalination. By working with these case studies, RECREATE will produce an open-access repository focused on water management practices and alternatives, as well as a Digital Decision Support Framework based on AI, changing the state of the art for effective and resilient water systems at a local and regional level.
With a particular focus on producing climate adaptation strategies for use in water-scarce regions, RECREATE creates new water resource planning pathways that contend with the current and future realities of climate change. In the words of project coordinator Digu Aruchamy (EURECAT), “My main expectation from RECREATE is to contribute to increasing awareness among citizens, local authorities, and policy makers on the use of AWR in their water management strategies, especially in the four case study regions of the project, and importantly contribute to related policy changes at the EU level. Further, I also hope that the project contributes to the increased marked potential and wider use of AWR technologies across Europe to help local regional governments in their water resilience and climate change adaptation strategies.”
In many places, Manresa included, droughts have already posed serious problems this year. On this note, Xavier Martinez Lladó, Director, UT Water, Air and Soil at EURECAT underscores the timeliness of RECREATE’s activities: “Water scarcity is becoming a global issue due to climate change, population growth, and non-integrated management. Climate change is dramatically changing the precipitation regimes all over Europe. For example, the Mediterranean basin of Spain is currently experiencing the effects of a three-year drought, the worst since there are records. These situations are expected to be more frequent on the upcoming decades. In this context, guaranteeing the availability of water through alternative sources (reuse, desalination, rainwater harvesting, etc.) is the only option without jeopardizing the socio-economic development of those areas affected by water scarcity.”
The project will have practical impacts on the ground, creating new tools to help communities find solutions that suit their unique challenges. In Xavier’s words, “RECREATE aims to generate the necessary knowledge to develop tools that facilitate decision-makers and different stakeholders the planning and management of the most appropriate infrastructures to guarantee water availability in climate change scenarios. The main impact that the RECREATE project aims to achieve is to help guarantee the availability and quality of water for different uses in those regions that are suffering, now and in the future, from water stress. This is intended to be achieved through the significant incorporation of technology and infrastructures that allow obtaining water from alternative sources.” RECREATE helps to ease the decision-making process and makes communities aware of their options in creating a more reliable, resilient water supply.
By giving a boost to alternative water resources and working with communities to make the transition to new water supply approaches possible, RECREATE is moving the needle on a more climate-resilient water supply across Europe.
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