AquaticPollutants ERA-NET Cofund

The project summary:

The overall objective of AquaticPollutants is to strengthen the European Research Area (ERA) in the field of clean and healthy aquatic ecosystems and to leverage untapped potential in the collaboration between the freshwater, marine and health research areas. The proposed ERA-NET Cofund aims at pooling resources from the 32 participating research programme owners / managers of 26 countries to implement a joint transnational call for proposals, with EU co-funding in the scientific area. 9 organisations from associated and third countries are joining the proposal as well. 

Their goal is support and connect their research communities to address the challenges of “Risks posed to human health and the environment by pollutants and pathogens present in water resources”. Specifically, they hope contribute to reducing or, even better, avoiding the input of pollutants and pathogens into the environment. In order to do that, they plan to apply a holistic catchment approach to better understand the ecological and human health effects. This approach has to include soil and groundwater transport as well as potential atmospheric pathways that these pollutants may take. The effects on human health, the transport and transmission of harmful substances, in particular those generating anti-microbial resistance, from the freshwater and marine environment to organisms via the food chain also need to be taken into account.

A multidisciplinary approach has been set up, which brings together the research needs of the freshwater sector, the marine sector and the health sector to carry out a JTC and complementing AA. This call will make the research communities of those three research fields work together and create synergies for joint approaches.

Project activities:

Project activities are divided to 6 work packages.
WP1: Management and Coordination. WP leader FFG
WP2: Preparation and launch of the co-funded call
WP3: Evaluation and proposal selection of the co-funded call
WP4: Follow up and monitoring of projects resulting from the co-funded call
WP5: Communication, exploitation and dissemination of the results
WP6: Additional activities

Participating organizations:

1. JÜLICH, Germany
2. BELSPO, Belgium
3. FNRS, Belgium
4. FWO, Belgium
5. RPF, Cyprus
6. TACR, Czech Republic
7. IFD, Denmark
8. ASRT, Egypt
9. ETAg, Estonia
10. AKA, Finland
11. ANR, France
12. EPA, Ireland
13. CSO-MOH, Israel
14. A.R.P.A., Italy
15. MIUR, Italy
16. NARD, Moldova
17. RCN, Norway
18. NCBR, Poland
19. FCT, Portugal
20. UEFISCDI, Romania
21. WRC, South Africa
22. AEI, Spain
23. ISCIII, Spain
24. FORMAS, Sweden
25. SRC, Sweden
26. MHESR, Tunisia
27. TUBITAK, Turkey
28. SCOTENT, UK
29. CONFAP, Brazil
30. GSRT, Greece
31. MoST, Taiwan
32. ISPRA, Italy

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 869178.