Sustanaible water for Mediterranean

In the Mediterranean region, expected increases in food demands by 2050 suggest that agricultural production and agricultural water use must increase, which is challenging to farming systems that often suffer from agricultural droughts and dry spells caused by management induced water scarcity. According to the European Environment Agency, agriculture accounts for 24% of water consumption in Europe, and up to 80% in some southern member states. The southern part of Mediterranean region has run out of renewable freshwater decades ago and is one of the driest agricultural regions on earth, containing only 1% of the world's freshwater resources. SWAM project will address a critical problem for Mediterranean countries, regarding sustainable water management for agriculture. Starting with the state of the art technological solutions, taking advantage of the complementary and multidisciplinary competences of the four Research and Technological Development partners, and taking into account the specificities of each country involved, SWAM will look for innovative and cost-effective solutions that could be de facto implemented in the market. The project aims at proposing sustainable options for water and soil management and their technical, economic, environmental and social implications. To achieve this purpose, the transnational team will select in each involved country - namely Algeria, Italy, Spain, Portugal - a representative case-study of water and soil management to be tackled according to respective comparative advantages. The project will address the following issues: 1) lack of exploitation of water resources (mainly runoff) due to missing technical solution, in vulnerable Mediterranean areas (arid regions) and related soil degradation that exacerbate desertification; 2) optimization of resource management by means of improved precision irrigation in medium to high drought risk areas (semi-arid regions). In arid regions, these objectives will be pursued by improving agricultural equipment and practices for water harvesting, through the development of improved machinery, the use of advanced technologies (GPS, laser-guide systems, distribute sensing system, representation of georeferenced data related to the crops productivity) and agronomic studies related to size and characteristics of micro-catchments. In semi-arid regions, the innovative approach will involve the precision irrigation and will be based on remote sensing, including above and underground Wireless Sensor Networks, models and a Decision Support System. Innovation will mainly cover two aspects: oidentification and testing of existing/new cost-effective sensors currently not widely employed in agriculture (technical innovation); ouse of remote sensing and above and underground W.S.N. where they have never been used before (some regions of Italy, Spain, Portugal, the most fertile areas of Algeria). In parallel with research in agronomy and technology, will consider a collaborative approach with all stakeholders involved in the area, at regional level.