OurMED PRIMA-funded Project: Sustainable Water Storage and Distribution in the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean Region is a unique mosaic of different cultures and climates that shape its peoples, natural environment, and species diversity. However, rapid population growth, urbanisation and increased anthropogenic pressures are threatening water quantity, quality, and related ecosystem services. Known as a climate change hotspot, the Mediterranean region is increasingly experiencing intensifying droughts, diminished river flows, and drier soils making water management even more challenging. This situation calls for an urgent need for water management to shift from a mono-sectoral water management approach based on trade-offs, to more balanced multisectoral management that considers the requirement of all stakeholders. This means that sustainable water management requires ensuring that water is stored and shared fairly across all sectors at the basin scale. The research project OurMED (https://www.ourmed.eu/) is part of the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA) Programme supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 2222. The project was launched in June 2023 and will continue for three years with a grant of 4.4 million euros to develop a holistic water storage and distribution approach tightly integrated into ecosystem services at the river basin scale. OurMED builds on the multidisciplinary skills of 15 consortium Partners and comprises universities, NGOs, research centres and SMEs from ten countries with complementary expertise in hydrology, hydrogeology, agronomy, climate change, social sciences, remote sensing, digital twins, ecology, and environmental sciences, among others, making it a truly interdisciplinary project. OurMED includes eight distinct demo sites, representing diverse water-related ecosystem properties of the Mediterranean landscape. These include the catchment areas of Bode (Germany), Agia (Crete, Greece), Konya (Turkey), Mujib (Jordan), Medjerda (Tunisia), Sebou (Morocco), Arborea (Sardinia, Italy), and Júcar (Spain). The Mediterranean basin, as a whole, is considered as an additional regional demo site to ensure replicability and reproducibility of proposed solutions at larger scales.  OurMED vision combines not only technologically-advanced monitoring, smart modelling and optimization capabilities, but also provides data fusion and integrated digital twin technologies to make optimized solutions readily available for decision making. OurMED concept and its implementation to the different demo sites will be presented and discussed.