Acquaount

ACQUAOUNT is a PRIMA European project coordinated by CMCC that brings together a consortium of 9 partners. ACQUAOUNT aims to improve Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and sustainable irrigation through the deployment of innovative tools, smart water services and solutions, for public and private use, while contributing to climate resilience. ACQUAOUNT will demonstrate through the deployment of a semantic WoT platform in different pilot sites how to provide accessible and accurate information to support optimization of irrigation practices for farmers and basin level water allocation for water managers. Issues related to water run across multiple sectors and the methods to improve its efficient use are considered to have a high return on investments with important multiplier effects on nearly all sectors. According to the SDG 6.5.1 baseline, the degree of development of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) strongly varies among countries and each country presents different criticalities. Further development of IWRM in Mediterranean countries is urgent as Climate Change (CC) projections foresee a reduction and degradation of water resources, while water demand for irrigation is projected to increase driven by an increase in food demand linked to population growth and CC itself. Agriculture is by far the most water demanding sector and a sustainable IWRM cannot be achieved without improving water use efficiency at farm level. On the other hand, improved methods to manage multiple resources (e.g. groundwater, grey water, reuse water) and effectively allocate water to satisfy demands from all sectors are essential to increase water use efficiency at basin and country level, leading to preservation of ecosystems and avoiding over exploitation of water resources. A shared vision exists that digitalization of the water sector is an effective tool to understand the multitude of interdependencies and thus analyse and manage highly complex systems. As such, digitalization holds the potential to positively affect multiple dimensions of water management, including water accounting, intra and inter-sector coordination, financing, governance, faster implementation of new policies and directives. Abinsula, as a technology provider, leads the activities related to the Web of Things (WoT) platform that uses System Dynamic Modelling tools to integrate data from a digital sensors network (at farm and basin level) and supporting data of multiple types (e.g. Remote sensing, Geo-databases of soil type and crop distribution) and provide information on the behaviour of the physical system, to continuously monitor and control water.