On February 27th 2024, the second co-design session of the PRIMA NATMed project’s Spanish case study took place at the Experimental Center for New Water Technologies (“Centro Experimental de Nuevas Tecnologías del Agua” or CENTA), in Carrión de los Céspedes (Seville, Spain). It was organized by the Environment and Water Agency of Andalusia (“Agencia de Medio Ambiente y Agua de Andalucía” or AMAYA), in collaboration with the rest of the project’s Spanish partners: CARTIF, Social Climate and NBSCLIMATE.
NATMed is a 3-year project funded by the European Commission through the PRIMA Program. It aims to develop, test, apply and validate 5 Nature-based Solutions (case studies) across 5 Mediterranean countries; integrating them into existing gray and natural infrastructure along the entire water cycle, in order to optimize ecosystem services related to and dependent on water, and hence contribute to sustainable water management in the region. To ensure a holistic approach and maximize impact, the Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are designed in adherence with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Global Standard for NbS.
Within this context, different relevant topics were discussed amongst a diversity of stakeholders, including the water-scarcity challenges facing agriculture in this drought-prone region, and how NbS permit the reuse of water for irrigation purposes, from an academic point of view as well as in practice through various technologies and solutions existing in the market.
The debate generated was very participative and inclusive, highlighting the collaborative spirit of the participants and their organizations, covering the entire value chain of water reuse in agriculture, from the local administration to farmers and their associations, passing by technical experts. Concretely speaking, besides the project partners already mentioned taking the role of hosts and facilitators (AMAYA had participants from both the Directorate of Water Management and Environmental Quality and that of Environment and Sustainability), there were representatives of the local administration (City Council of Carrión de los Céspedes), FERAGUA (association of irrigators), individual local farmers, regional public entities such as Technology Corporation of Andalusia (“Corporación Tecnológica de Andalucía” CTA) or Andalusia’s Entrepreneurship Agency (“Andalucía Emprende”), BIOAZUL (SME specializing in sustainable water management), University of Cordoba, and several technical experts from EMASESA’s water chair, and AMAYA.
