Dr. Hadi Jaafar and team kick-start TALANOA-WATER project
Integrated management for water resources in the Mediterranean
A full day kick-off meeting was held on June 24, 2021 gathering 7 partners from 6 countries: Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Italy, France and Spain, to initiate the project.
Dr. Hadi Jaafar, along with research assistants Rim Hazimeh and Roya Mourad, presented at the TALANOA-WATER kick-off meeting on June 24, 2021. The project is an innovation action with a duration of 48 months (2021-23) and is funded by Horizon 2020 European Union Funding for Research & lnnovation, and Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA Foundation).
TALANOA-WATER responds to the PRIMA Call “Section 1 – topic 1.1.1-2020 (IA) Implementing sustainable, integrated management of water resources in the Mediterranean, under climate change conditions”.
During the full-day meeting, members of the partners’ teams met, created a common understanding of the objectives, methods, and deliverables of the project, and set the tone for a dynamic collaboration and workflow.
Dr. Jaafar is the Principal Investigator of TALANOA-WATER at the American University of Beirut. The project gathers 7 partners from 6 countries (Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Italy, France, and Spain) and its international scientific consortium is led by Dr. Dionisio Pérez-Blanco, a distinguished researcher at the Universidad de Salamanca (USAL), and the coordinator of the project.
The objective of TALANOA-WATER is to inform and catalyze the adoption of robust transformational adaptation strategies to water scarcity under climate change that contribute to the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) targets of social equity, economic efficiency and environmental sustainability. To this end, TALANOA-WATER will develop a groundbreaking ecosystem of innovation that combines an inclusive and transparent stakeholder engagement method with an actionable modeling framework inspired in interdisciplinary socio-hydrology science, so to design, realize and demonstrate performance of transformational adaptation strategies at various scales (from plot to basin, from user to economic sector).
The flexibility and replicability of TALANOA-WATER ecosystem of innovation is an asset that facilitates its wide application across different areas, and will be empirically applied in six water scarce pilot water laboratories across the Mediterranean: the lower Nile River Basin (RB) in Egypt, the Po RB in Italy, the Hérault Department in France, the Upper Litani Catchment in Lebanon, the Cega Catchment in Spain and the Jeffara Catchment in Tunisia.
Get to know more about the project here.