- A first line will be allocated to water management, preservation, and improvement projects with 1.2 million euros.
- The second grant, which will have €400,000, will finance smart specialization projects for flood risk.
The Agència Catalana de l’Aigua has approved the bases to implement two new lines of aid aimed at financing projects within the framework of research, development, and innovation (R+D+i). The total budget for these initiatives is 1.6 million euros, which will be distributed: (1) to projects related to the preservation and improvement of the aquatic environment (1.2 million euros), and (2) to projects on specialization intelligent linked to flood risk (€400,000).
Management, preservation, and improvement of the aquatic environment
- Drought and adaptation to climate change: such as projects that analyse and predict external phenomena that may affect the state of water. In general, they are those whose objective is to guarantee the availability of the resource in any scenario.
- Circular economy and reuse: through studies framed in the reuse of water or the production of regenerated water.
- Mediterranean ecosystems and improvement of the state of the environment: those initiatives that evaluate dynamic self-purification systems for nutrients and contaminants, propose revegetation and conditioning, manage sediments, or evaluate marine systems, among others.
- Sanitation and protection of the environment: these can be projects related to the implementation of traceability systems for contaminating compounds, the restoration of the environment and decontamination, the digitalization of the water cycle, etc.
- Environmental services and socioeconomic analysis: development of initiatives around methodologies for analysis and calculation of environmental costs, valuation of ecosystem services, or studies to increase knowledge of the social effects of water management.
Smart specialization for flood risk
Regarding the €400,000 line, it will be open to initiatives that deal with the development and implementation of tools and instruments to generate warnings or help decision-making. Likewise, projects that improve data interaction and user participation will also be eligible for this aid.
With these two new lines, the Agència Catalana de l’Aigua (ACA) aims to increase the investment allocated to R&D&i projects in water management to almost 3 million euros, since in the 2016-2021 cycle, 1.2 million euros were also allocated.