A fruitful arena for water experts and EU policymakers to share expertise and collaborate
The 3rd edition of the Water Project Europe happened last March, and was dedicated to ”Water in the Circular Economy Policy Agenda”. Six Horizon 2020 funded projects, including NextGen, took the floor to introduce and share their approaches and groundbreaking ideas in an open discussion with the Project Officers of the European Commission. They offered a clear set-up on policy development to improve the water circular economy.
This forum aimed at fostering collaboration between EU funded projects, developing strategies for the replication, scaling up and market outreach of the outcomes, and to extract and valorise components useful to policy building. Water experts and policy makers discussed the governance challenges in the transition towards circular water solutions.
The event’s programme consisted of brief presentations from the projects, each highlighting relevant directive topics, and showing results from a demo case on the policy implications for the circular water solution. Each presentation ended with a discussion statement. Those were addressed together with the EU policy officers after the presentations’ sessions.
As a follow-up on the discussions, NextGen will develop a policy brief highlighting and outlining the learnings and recommendations of the project, with key-recommendations.
This way, project results can become an excellent tool for policy makers to:
• provide evidence for policy development and design;
• highlight gaps or barriers in current policy frameworks or approaches;
• help develop new opportunities and innovative activities for any area of policymaking across Europe and the world.