Water EIP: First Action Groups selected

The European Innovation Partnership (EIP) on Water has announced the successful applicants from the first call for expressions of interest for establishing Action Groups. More than sixty proposals were submitted for evaluation.

Nine Action Groups were selected out of 64 applications at the end of May 2013. In total, over 700 individual organisations participated in the first call for expressions of commitment demonstrating the relevance of the EIP Water. The successful projects were:

• W4EF: Framework for evaluation and reporting of the energy impacts on water
• Renewable Energy Desalination (RE-Desalination)
• Anaerobic membrane Bioreactor for Recovery of Energy and Resources
• Industrial Water Re-use and Recycling
• Smart Pricing and Drought Insurance Schemes in Mediterranean Countries
• CITY BLUEPRINTS: Improving Implementation Capacities of Cities and Regions
• WaterCoRe: Regional governance of water scarcity and drought issues
• ESE - Ecosystem Services for Europe
• FINNOWATER

Officials from ten different Directorates General of the European Commission participated in the evaluation of the proposals. The selected Action Groups were deemed to fulfil all requirements and showed the most promising approaches, combining innovative ideas with partners across the innovation value chain and demonstrating the potential to deliver concrete results.

All the submitted Action Group proposals have received detailed feedback and the European Commission has strongly encouraged the partners involved to further strengthen their proposals and submit them again during the next call for expressions of commitment. Some general information on the proposals submitted for evaluation in the first call can be found here.

The EIP’s annual conference will be organised in November which will be an opportunity to showcase ideas and seek further consortium partners, and the second call for action groups will be published at that time.

Detailed information about all nine successful Action Group proposals, their origins and other details can be found here.

Ad-hoc Group
In separate news the EIP on Water has established an ad-hoc group as part of the task force set up to develop the EIP’s Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) to identify  barriers and bottle necks to innovation in the sector and propose some new solutions. SusChem and Cefic via Antonia Morales Peres is heavily involved in this initiative with Thomas Track of Dechema.

For more information on the EIP and other SusChem work on water issues, please contact Antonia Morales Perez at Cefic.