Towards the water infrastructures of the future

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• water infrastructures are flexible enough to face changes in hydraulic flow and pollution load from emerging or yet unknown contaminants to ensure that access to water and sanitation is protected on a long-term, recovery of safe secondary resources is secured and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and ecosystems are protected;
• water infrastructures have integrated digital solutions (e.g., smart sensors, IoT, digital twins and artificial intelligence) as well as citizen science to optimally operate in changing conditions from climate or pollution pressures, facilitate appropriate water pricing based on reliable monitoring of water consumption, favour recovery of material and limit greenhouse gas emissions;
• water infrastructures have incorporated the necessary tools and protection to avoid cyber and/or terrorist attacks to ensure their resilience against malicious behaviour;
• new or renewed water infrastructures are designed following ‘good practices’ to maximise system resilience, build redundancy, and ensure ecological and social sustainability;
• water infrastructures are better designed thanks to improved predictions, robust assessment of impacts and implementation of appropriate mitigation measures due to advances on the understanding of how, when and where floods and droughts occur.

Scope:

Water infrastructures both for drinking water supply and wastewater collection and treatment suffer from a lack of sufficient and continuous investment across Europe. Their conditions are evolving differently depending on the investment capacity of local authorities and/or water companies, as well as the climate and pollution conditions they are exposed to. They are often not flexible enough to adapt to a changing and increasingly unpredictable environment and lack of appropriate monitoring to properly understand their functioning in various operating conditions. On the treatment side, the technological processes are not always coping with pollution load variation or new contaminants threatening human health and downstream ecosystems. They are also more and more exposed to the risk of malicious attacks, being of human or cyber nature.

With the effect of climate change as well as the emergence of new threats from chemical, biological, human and cyber origins, it is necessary to develop and test a set of tools to ensure that water and sanitation provision is resilient now and for the future, building on the solutions that emerged in the sector or adapted from other sectors.

To achieve the expected outcomes, proposals should address some or all the elements below:

• develop and integrate modular processes and tools to improve the adaptability of drinking water and wastewater infrastructures to emerging pollutions and effects of climate change;
• integrate Nature-based Solutions infrastructures to reduce the carbon footprint of water infrastructure, better manage water flows and pollutants entering sewers, and support biodiversity;
• enhance the use of digital solutions, new monitoring techniques, Earth observation tools, digital twin technology and artificial intelligence, including for predictive analytics, within drinking water and wastewater infrastructures to optimise their operation, anticipate infrastructure challenges and pollution and improve their efficiency and resilience, addressing leakages, infiltration, energy consumption, recovery of materials and carbon footprint;
• develop robust data sharing framework to promote secure collaboration among stakeholders and identify interdependencies with other critical infrastructures in a resilience-based approach;
• develop tools, approaches and procedures to protect both the physical and digital water infrastructures against malicious attacks.

Proposals are encouraged to explore the use of blockchain or other distributed ledger technologies to ensure data integrity, enable smart-contract–based service automation, and support novel financing or certification schemes for future water infrastructures. Given the high degree of integration of the topic with existing infrastructures, proposals should target a large variety of stakeholders ranging from universities, SMEs, water utilities, energy utilities, etc.

Proposals should also seek to contribute to the further development of existing observing platforms and initiatives, including to the evolution of Copernicus services and the future EU Digital Twin on freshwater and Destination Earth. It should also contribute to define the bases for a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) sharing of data in the water sector in collaboration with the initiative conducted by the co-funded partnership Water Security for the Planet (Water4All).

All in-situ data collected through actions funded from this call should follow INSPIRE principles and be available through open access repositories (e.g. Copernicus). supported by the European Commission.

Proposals should also build on the results of previous projects funded under previous framework programmes, especially the projects related to the cluster ICT4Water. They should also foster complementarities and avoid overlapping with projects funded under the Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters by 2030 and the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change. Finally, it should also look for collaboration with projects from Horizon Europe Cluster 3 in relation to security, where appropriate. The JRC may contribute with technical analysis and research on digital technologies for water management and monitoring, including real-world test cases.

International cooperation is strongly encouraged.