Understanding and assessing the value of water and incorporating it into decision-making are fundamental to achieving sustainable and equitable water resources management and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
In this direction, B-WaterSmart has contributed to the development and implementation of a strategic methodological framework to organize, drive, and support key activities to achieve systemic innovation in full-scale water-smart systems, including stakeholder networking and dialogue, joint definition of concerns, issues, and ambitions, identification and overcoming of technical, social, and governance barriers, consensual cross-sectoral solutions, and development and long-term implementation of water-smartness strategies.
B-WaterSmart contributed to progress beyond state-of-the art with the design, planning, construction, and customization of 14 innovative technologies and the development of 18 smart solutions that complement each other and support systemic innovation. Important added value was not only delivering a high number of individual tools, but B-WaterSmart also focused on developing, proposing and applying combination of tools that can be considered as a suite that can support different contents and scales and can be used within different workflows starting from the conceptualization phase, the design phase, testing, what if scenarios exploration, implementation, monitoring and so on. In order to make the process understandable and accessible to users beyond the project, two complementary toolkits were created.
B-WaterSmart supported the implementation and improvement of EU policies with the development of a representative and homogenized list of circular economy indicators, adapted to a water-smart society embracing the water-energy-resources-waste nexus and a step-by-step methodology for circularity assessment. Moreover, synergies relating to a water-smart society with the EU taxonomy under development have been identified. This will enhance access to new innovation projects and financing opportunities.
A new conceptual model to analyze the perceptions and behaviors of stakeholders and citizens in relation to water-smart solutions, developed by the project, adopts an interdisciplinary approach by combining the perspectives of sociology, human geography and social psychology.
All in all, B-WaterSmart outputs aim at supporting the design and implementation of EU policy relevant for water-smartness, including the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change (2013) and the Circular Economy Action Plan (2020). Furthermore, in four policy briefs, the project provides recommendations on how to better implement recent EU policies such as the EU Regulation for Water Reuse (in force since 2023) and the EU Urban Revised Wastewater Treatment Directive (UWWTD), based on the pilots of the B-WaterSmart living labs.
