Due to an increasing demographic pressure, the Metropolitan Region of Recife (RMR, the fifth largest metropolitan area in Brazil), went through remarkable water and land use changes over the last decades. These evolutions gave rise to numerous environmental consequences, such as a dramatic decline of the piezometric levels, groundwater salinization and contamination. This degradation of natural resources is linked to the increase of water demand, punctually amplified by drought periods which induced the construction of thousands of private wells, hindering global political solutions. The RMR thus appears as a typical "hot spot" illustrating the problems of emerging countries such as urbanization, unequal distribution of wealth, limited effects of political decisions, rapid industrial and touristic development. All these factors induce high pressures on water resources both on quantity and quality in the context of global social and environmental changes. Under these conditions, the COQUEIRAL project proposes an interdisciplinary research program aiming to study the human impact on coastal overexploited aquifers. The project is structured in three principal converging axes: (1) the analysis of pressures on the groundwater resources and their societal and structural reasons, (2) the identification of sources and mechanisms of groundwater quality and quantity degradation, focusing on the physical and chemical processes as vectors of the reaction of the system to the external pressures and (3) the assessment of the regional impact of global changes on water ressources. COQUEIRAL will approach the degradation of the groundwater resources by questioning the specific conditions of urbanization and water administration in Recife at multiple levels: the macro-sociological level with the political and institutional stake of water management; the meso-sociological level with the water’s collective stakes and their perceptions; and the micro-sociological level, meaning the representations, practices, individual and collective uses of water. Geomorphological-urban maps will complete the knowledge. In parallel to the acquisition of new geological, hydrological and hydrogeological data, COQUEIRAL will elaborate methods to determine the origin and processes of salinization, including a multi-tracer approach, to identify sources and pathways of inorganic contamination. and to determine the residence time of water within the aquifer system. Based on the gained knowledge, hydrogeological conceptual and 3D numerical models of the functioning of the aquifer system in its social and environmental contexts will be developed. In the aim to improve existing management tools, COQUEIRAL will propose the outlines for best practices, based on scenarios of groundwater resources evolution resulting from the sociological and climatic scenarios developed in the project. Knowing the outstanding importance of water resources management for the regional development, COQUEIRAL will share the results of this interdisciplinary work with all relevant stakeholders, through a variety of communication networks, including a photographic exhibition. The results obtained in the specific framework of the metropolitan region of Recife are in great part transposable to similar contexts of "hot spots" of human and climatic pressure on water resources in emerging countries. At French level, the project also involves a SME (Geo-Hyd) and will serve as a example for future collaborations with regional enterprises at an international scale. The project has applied for labeling by the “pôle de compétitivité” DREAM.

The AquaNES project will catalyse innovations in water and wastewater treatment processes and management through improved combinations of natural and engineered components. Among the demonstrated solutions are natural treatment processes such as bank filtration (BF), managed aquifer recharge (MAR) and constructed wetlands (CW) plus engineered pre- and post-treatment options. The project focuses on 13 demonstration sites in Europe, India and Israel covering a repre-sentative range of regional, climatic, and hydrogeological conditions in which different combined natural-engineered treatment systems (cNES) will be demonstrated through active collaboration of knowledge and technology providers, water utilities and end-users. Our specific objectives are • to demonstrate the benefits of post-treatment options such as membranes, activated carbon and ozonation after bank filtration for the production of safe drinking water • to validate the treatment and storage capacity of soil-aquifer systems in combination with oxidative pre-treatments • to demonstrate the combination of constructed wetlands with different technical post- or pre-treatment options (ozone or bioreactor systems) as a wastewater treatment option • to evidence reductions in operating costs and energy consumption • to test a robust risk assessment framework for cNES • to deliver design guidance for cNES informed by industrial or near-industrial scale expe-riences • to identify and profile new market opportunities in Europe and overseas for cNES The AquaNES project will demonstrate combined natural-engineered treatment systems as sus-tainable adaptations to issues such as water scarcity, excess water in cities and micro-pollutants in the water cycle. It will thus have impact across the EIP Water’s thematic priorities and cross-cutting issues, particularly on ‘Water reuse & recycling’, ‘Water and wastewater treatment’, ‘Water-energy nexus’, ‘Ecosystem services’, ‘Water governance’, and ‘DSS & monitoring’.

Most of the existing forecast and early warning systems rely on the prediction of hydrodynamic conditions at the coast, or exceptionally on flood computations inland, but under deep simplifications. Recent scientific progresses now allow properly modeling coastal flooding events. Such models are nevertheless very expensive in terms of computation time (>hours) which prevents any use for forecast and warning or even for estimating the coastal flood hazard return period together with uncertainties. These challenges raise several questions: “How to improve coastal flooding early warning systems?”, “How to improve coastal flooding assessment and ensure taking into account all possible events?”, “How to deal with uncertainties and raise awareness on climate change effects?”. RISCOPE aims at addressing part of these challenges by developing a risk-based method contributing to forecast, early warning and prevention of coastal flooding risks. In this bottom-up approach, the starting point is the key information useful for decision making (e.g. water level on a strategic asset). This allows to produce targeted warnings but also to identify all the scenarios that may lead the flood to exceed given thresholds. The method should be robust, fast and integrate the complexity of coastal flood processes (e.g. overtopping, interaction with structures) and cascade effect (e.g. coastal defense failure). RISCOPE should thus constitute a breakthrough alternative to existing systems and methods. One of the challenges is to develop fast and robust coastal flooding models accounting for processes complexity and cascade effect. The solution explored in RISCOPE relies on meta-models, i.e. mathematical functions which estimate with good precision and at a negligible computational cost (

The SAMCO project aims to develop a proactive resilience framework enhancing the overall resilience of societies on the impacts of mountain risks. The project aims to elaborate methodological tools to characterize and measure ecosystem and societal resilience from an operative perspective on three mountain representative case studies. To achieve this objective, the methodology is split in several points with (1) the definition of the potential impacts of global environmental changes (climate system, ecosystem e.g. land use, socio-economic system) on landslide hazards, (2) the analysis of these consequences in terms of vulnerability (e.g. changes in the location and characteristics of the impacted areas and level of their perturbation) and (3) the implementation of a methodology for quantitatively investigating and mapping indicators of mountain slope vulnerability exposed to several hazard types, and the development of a GIS-based demonstration platform. The strength and originality of the SAMCO project will be to combine different techniques, methodologies and models (multi-hazard assessment, risk evolution in time, vulnerability functional analysis, and governance strategies) and to gather various interdisciplinary expertises in earth sciences, environmental sciences, and social sciences. The multidisciplinary background of the members could potentially lead to the development of new concepts and emerging strategies for mountain hazard/risk adaptation. Research areas, characterized by a variety of environmental, economical and social settings, are severely affected by landslides, and have experienced significant land use modifications (reforestation, abandonment of traditional agricultural practices) and human interferences (urban expansion, ski resorts construction) over the last century.