The 2nd General Meeting of SUWANU EUROPE took place on 23rd and 24th of January in Rome.
During this event all the partners of the consortium met to present the work carried out during the first year of the project and discuss about the following steps. The meeting was held in Rome at the Palazzo Della Valle where is located the head office of Confagricoltura.
This general meeting was attended by some members of the regional working groups of the project:
- Mr. Carlos Benitez from EMGRISA, a Spanish company focused on the environmental conservation and water treatment, presented the DSEAR Plan, the National Purification, Sanitation, Efficiency, Savings and Reuse Plan for Spain. This is an initiative from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition of Spain (MITECO) which its main objective to achieve in this plan is to review the intervention strategies designed in the second cycle hydrological plans.
- Mr. Nikolay Mihalkov from the National Water Association of Bulgaria, who talked about the work of the WSS Ltd Plovdiv, which is a single-member company with limited responsibilities on behalf of the Ministry of regional development; and the responsible about the utilisation of reclaimed water from WWTP “HISARIA” for irrigation in Plovdiv.
- Mr. Konstantinos Kotoulas from Thessaloniki Water Supply & Sewerage Company (EYATH S.A.) presented the experience of the Thessaloniki Wastewater Treatment Plant and their lessons learned during the implementation.
- Dr. Luigi Tozzi from Confagricoltura explained some of the main challenges to face the climate change and how to mitigate and adapt to the effects on agriculture.
Furthermore, Giacomo Giannoccaro from the University of Bari attended the meeting as part of the External Advisory Board (EAB) of SUWANU-EUROPE. He offered his economical point of view to deal the problems related to the implementation of the reclaimed water technologies and the reuse in agriculture, moreover he emphasised the need to involve all the stakeholder into the change of legislation at regional level.
Regarding the general aspects of the project, during this meeting the main outcomes achieved within the Work Package 1 were presented as the SWOT and AKIS analyses developed for each one of the SUWANU EUROPE regions. Another great achievement was the participatory workshops included in the Work Package 2, all the regions organized their workshops with a big success of audience. The stakeholders could meet the objective of the project and discuss about the problems related to the use of reclaimed water in agriculture. Furthermore, the partners talked about the running tasks that must be developed in the following months such as the finalization of the general action plan and the regional action plans.
Likewise, they will begin the activities included in Work Package 3, which aims to transfer project materials and results using attractive channels for the “users”, adapting knowledge to their language and format and having real impact. For example, thematic factsheets will begin to be developed, online courses will be designed, and training workshops will be organized.
The meeting ended with an open discussion which was introduced by Diego Berger from MEKOROT (Israel). He presented the reflexions after the first year of the project and offered their experience in the reclaimed water field. Afterwards, the rest of the partners and those invited to this meeting had the opportunity to provide their point of view and suggestions for the following challenges of SUWANU-EUROPE.