Dr. Hadi Jaafar is Principal Investigator of TALANOA-WATER at the American University of Beirut. The project's international scientific consortium gathers 7 partners from 6 countries (Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Italy, France, and Spain) and is led by project coordinator, Dr. Dionisio Pérez-Blanco, a distinguished researcher at the Universidad de Salamanca (USAL). Dr. Jaafar and his team presented at the June 24, 2021, TALANOA-WATER kick-off meeting. The project, an innovation action, has a 48 month duration (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). 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.
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". 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 inclusive, transparent stakeholder engagement with an actionable modeling framework inspired in interdisciplinary socio-hydrology science, so as 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 are assets that facilitate its wide application across areas and will be empirically applied in six water scarce pilot water laboratories in the Mediterranean, including: Egypt's lower Nile River Basin (RB), Italy's Po RB, France's Hérault Department, Lebanon's Upper Litani Catchment, Spain's Cega Catchment, and Tunisia's Jeffara Catchment.
Get to know more about the project here.
