Water4All is the name of the 2022 call for the Water Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) grant program. The program is a partnership of research institutions both inside and outside the European Union, in order to support research and innovation projects in the field of water. The focus is in realizing sustainable water systems within and outside of Europe.
In order to strengthen cooperation in water-related research, development and innovation (RD&I), and to produce and share water-related knowledge, Water4All is launching a series of annual ‘Joint Transnational Calls’ (JTC). From September 2022, it will be possible to submit grant applications for this. The participating countries are the European countries, Brazil, Israel, South Africa and Turkey.
For whom is the program intended?
- Organisations seeking/wishing to conduct research or innovation projects aimed at providing knowledge, models, approaches, tools or methodologies to better understand hydrological processes at different scales.
- Projects should enable a more efficient response to future water problems caused by extreme weather events related to climate change.
What is the (societal) aim?
The societal goal of this program is to stimulate transformations and changes throughout the research and innovation process. By bringing partners from different countries together, the program provides matchmaking between problem owners and solution providers, with the aim of ensuring long-term water security for all. The ultimate goal is to make the entire water system more sustainable and adaptive to climate change.
Which projects and activities are eligible?
Water JPI aims, by 2030, to:
- reduce water stress,
- better protect water resources and ecosystems, and
- improve the resilience, mitigation, and adaptation of water systems.
This has been conveyed through the following three specific grant calls:
Resilience, adaptation, and mitigation
The aim of this call is to improve resilience, develop and demonstrate innovative strategies, and address knowledge gaps on water-related climate issues. Possible themes for projects are:
- Research into water scarcity, drought, flooding or seasonal variations in climate impacts
- Developing a regional- or watershed-scale approach that takes climate change into account
- Demonstration projects that improve water infrastructure and network resilience and adaptation to climate change, for example with regards to industrial water supplies, urban networks, wastewater treatment plants, stormwater management systems, and rural systems.
Tool for water management
This call is mainly concerns the development of supporting tools, the implementation of strategies and the generation of new methodologies, instruments and models. These implementations are related to extreme weather events caused by climate change. This specific call covers:
- Development projects that implement multi-risk approaches or decision support tools to mitigate extreme events, such as floods, ‘flash-floods’, heat waves and droughts
- Projects that combine physical and digital solutions to assess or model water resources of a water body in a given area.
- Engineering projects that use innovative digitisation, including improved/new sensors, models, communication and computing technologies.
Improved water management
Projects within this call carry out analyses and develop robust governance models for the management of water resources related to extreme climate-related events. Successful projects contribute to increasing the decision-making capacity of institutions and the involvement of citizens. The themes include:
- Improving coordination between water managers to increase their ability to reduce vulnerability to and respond effectively to extreme climatic events.
- Addressing and encouraging international cooperation on water, including managing transboundary water resources and contributing to diplomatic solutions regarding water-related discussions.
- Modelling programs to better predict short heavy intensity rain showers and to calculate the exact amount of water falling at a specific location.
Conditions, characteristics and key figures
- The total budget of the program is €30 million.
- The project must consist of an international consortium of 3 to 7 organizations from different participating countries. At least 2 of the participants must be independent parties within the EU or Horizon Europe participating countries.
- For NWO, professors, university (head) lecturers and other researchers with similar appointments can apply if they are permanently employed or have a tenure track agreement with one of the organisations described in the Funding Organisation rules (NWO section) of the call for proposals
- Funding per participant depends on the funding conditions of their national/regional funding organization. For the Netherlands this is NOW.
- The budget available from NWO for the Dutch participants is € 1,128,000
- A maximum of €270,000 per project can be requested from NWO
- The maximum project duration is 36 months
Deadlines
- Calls open on September 1, 2022
- Deadline for pre-applications is on October 31, 2022
- The deadline for the full application is on March 20, 2023
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