ICT4WATER Workshop: Digital Tools and Technologies enhancing water resilience

A Water Innovation Europe (WIE) event organised by the ICT4Water cluster, June 19, 2024, 9:30 – 16:00, BluePoint, Brussels

On June 19, members of the ICT4Water cluster, policy makers from various DGs, and other professionals gathered in a session to discuss tools and technologies for enhancing water resilience and to explore how water policies could be improved. The session was part of Water Innovation Europe 2024, one of a series of events organised by Water Europe and attracted around 30 people.

Andrea Rubini (Water Europe) welcomed the participants on behalf of Water Europe and stressed the good relation between Water Europe and the ICT4Water cluster. He praised the long existence of the cluster and stressed the importance of capitalisation of R&D efforts.

Lydia S. Vamvakeridou-Lyroudia (KWR Water Research, ICT4Water AG coordinator) introduced  the agenda focusing on water resilience and how the cluster is / can contribute to it. She emphasized that the cluster is about the member projects and highlighted the important and meaningful past publications of the cluster that contributed to the EU policy-making and shaping.

RTD/REA – Introduction

Bertrand Vallet (RTD) made the connection of the cluster with the EU Mission: Restore our  Oceans and Waters and presented an overview of the EU policy challenges. Bertrand concluded with an overview of the need for a new European water policy which includes an EU vision for 2050 Water Resilience endorsed by the college, the call for an EU Blue Deal and the adoption of a resolution on droughts by the European Parliament. (presentation RTD)

Vasileios Tyriakidis (REA) presented the key messages and the urgent needs, such as the call to no longer ignore the world’s water scarcity and crisis of water, the upcoming final deadline in 2027 for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), and the need to boost systemic transformation across the entire research – water innovation pipeline.

He demonstrated the REA’s role in the clustering of water projects and the importance to make the links to the projects of other clusters that have the digital component. He underlined three very active clusters – ICT4Water, ZP4Water, and CIRSEAU facilitated by REA and encouraged the ICT4Water cluster to keep on formulating recommendations to support the implementation of the EU water and digital policies and to identify the R&D needs to be included in the new Horizon Europe Work programmes. (presentation REA)

Action Groups – Results and contributions to water resilience initiatives

The workshop followed by the presentations from six thematic action groups of the cluster. Lydia S. Vamvakeridou-Lyroudia (KWR Water Research, ICT4Water AG coordinator) chaired the session presenting the history and the goals of the ICT4Water cluster as well as the Action Plan. The action group members presented their contribution to water resilience initiative via recommendations, highlighting the importance of the digital solutions to support it. The presentations were based on the relevant examples from the case studies / demo-cases. (Presentation Lyda)

  1. Action Group Enabling Data Sharing, represented by WATERVERSE and FIWARE, highlighted the following key points related to Water Data Management Ecosystem (WDME) and Enabling Data Sharing through FIWARE.
  • The need to empower data sharing and interoperability,
  • To create an open and transparent water sector,
  • Use of a resilience digital village twin for flood management.
  • To foster the adoption of common water ontologies and data models
  • To encourage cross-sector collaboration (among water and other sectors)

Presentation WATERVERSE

Presentation FIWARE

  1. The key points from Intelligent and Smart Systems Action Group, presented by Water-Futures, WATERVERSE, DIGIWATER and ARSINOE related to the Advances in Artificial Intelligence and harnessing the potential of Digital Twins for the Water Sector were the following:
  • Reinforcement learning and staged optimisation can form the basis for creating the next generation of water distribution systems,
  • Need to acknowledge deep uncertainty in the decision making process and move towards more adaptive planning
  • Digital twin of the drinking water network to improve system resilience.

Presentation WATERVERSE pilot

Presentation WaterFutures

  1. Critical Infrastructure Protection Action Group focused their presentations on the Assessments for Contamination events (PathoCERT), disruptions to services due to natural hazards (ARSINOE), and stress testing for cyber-physical threats (STOP-IT) presenting the following cases and solutions:
  • During emergencies, digital twin can prevent exposure to waterborne pathogens,
  • Simulation of disruption of critical infrastructure shows a major impact on public services and should be used in decision making and communication,
  • Embrace the concept of ‘cyber-physical’ when considering critical water infrastructures.

Presentation PathoCERT

Presentation PROCRUSTES

  1. Actor Engagement and Co-creation AG concentrated on the Immersive experiences and serious gaming for engagement by presenting the following show-cases:
  • ToyTown, a serious game which demonstrates the impact of different value chains for the circular solutions on water and energy usage.

Presentation NextGen

  1. Business Models Action Group, represented by DEEP-PURPLE and ULTIMATE projects, concentrated their presentations on Circular Economy tools for a water smart industry by providing the following examples:
  • A Decision Support System (DSS) for optimal Waste Water Treatment Plant’s operational and sustainability performance where the key elements are data reliability and streamlined and accepted assessment models,
  • Cafloodpro, an interactive online tool for decision co-creation focusing on water, allowing the exploration of circular economy and industrial symbiosis paradigms.

Presentation DEEP-PURPLE

Presentation ULTIMATE

  1. Policy Action Group, represented by WATERVERSE, IMPETUS and NEXOGENESIS, identified the following hotspots and vulnerabilities to climate change, and the assessment of potential future environmental policies focusing on the following key points:
    • The need for a Water Data Management Ecosystem to enable more effective operations of assets and system, and to better understand the causes of changes in water quality, providing means to address these issues and boost the performance of water infrastructure,
    • Use of combined climatic and socioeconomic datasets to identify regions with high exposure to climatic risks and/or low adaptation capacity,
    • Simulation tools to support robust environmental policies around river basins are more impactful when connected with local stakeholders.

Presentation WATERVERSE

Presentation Nexogenesis

Presentation IMPETUS

Panel discussion – Policy recommendations for building water smart and resilient society and economy for Europe

The final part of the session involved a panel discussion around the following theme –  Building resilience to climate change and sustainability for Europe. The panellists were: Lukas Repa (DG ENV), Bertrand Vallet (DG RTD) Gabriel Anzaldi (EURECAT) and Evina Katsou (Imperial College). Richard Elelman (EURECAT) moderated the discussion.

The panel discussion started with a short presentation about Dynamic Risk Management for Smart Water Systems in EU policies. Risk management processes are mandatory and present in all water-related laws but the challenges are lack of universal guidelines across Directives for Risk Assessment and Management, lack of real-time monitoring, limited and fragmented data sharing, and data quality. Therefore, the recommendation for policy makers was to adopt a standardised, dynamic, data-centric, and holistic risk management approach with adaptive risk management plans.

Presentation Evina

Key messages from the discussion were:

  • We need an European water resilience strategy to ensure that all stakeholders have the same level of information to cope with the climate challenges that are already happening now,
  • We have excellent science but we lack the last step – the application of smart solutions by large water-consuming industries,
  • We need to integrate high water-consuming industries more into the R&I projects,
  • Europe progressed in multiple areas, with developing policies in a more systemic manner, with stimulating the inclusion of social science in research and innovation projects, and with the collecting and publishing of centralised water related data on EU level,
  • We have a fear that knowledge in R&I and data stays in siloes, and data is not shared between relevant stakeholders in the region. Therefore here the European dataspaces need to come into water sector and to be combined and linked to other water-dependent sectors.

Durk Krol (Water Europe) thanked the cluster. Lydia Vamvakeridou-Lyroudia (one of the cluster managers) closed the session and thanked all participants for their contributions.