Project: AWESOME - mAnaging Water, Ecosystems and food across sectors and Scales in the sOuth MEditerranean

Acronym	AWESOME
Project Topic	Global trends in population growth and rising economic prosperity are expected to increase the demand for energy, food and water in the Mediterranean region to a point where they may compromise the sustainable use of natural resources. This context calls for the adoption of integrated and participatory approaches that explicitly account for the water-ecosystem-food (WEF) Nexus to explore tradeoffs, synergies, and nested interdependencies across sectors and to generate shared economic, environmental, and societal benefits. The main objective of AWESOME is developing a decision-analytic platform based on a multi-level, integrated WEF model to address the Nexus and explore the interdependencies and feedbacks across a hierarchy of spatial scales, from the macroeconomic development, to regional planning down to the single farm. The platform will allow simulating the impacts of alternative WEF planning portfolios composed of regional policies, river-basin strategic planning solutions, and technological options demonstrated at the local scale, across the different and often competing components of the WEF Nexus. As a result, AWESOME will make substantial progress in systems approaches to support the transition towards a more sustainable and resilient agriculture in southern Mediterranean countries under diverging water availability and demand due to the projected impacts of changing climate and society. The integration of models running at different spatial scales allows a better characterization of different technological solutions to produce water and food, namely soilless agriculture and aquaculture, demonstrated at the micro-scale to inform the systems model supporting strategic planning at the river basin scale, and a more realistic representation of macro-scale processes and regional policies influencing river basin dynamics in terms of land use, water and energy demands, and ecosystem services.
Network	PRIMA
Call	Section 1 Call 2019 - Nexus 2019 (Research and Innovation)

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Politecnico di Milano	Coordinator	Italy
2	Agrimatic Farms	Partner	Egypt
3	RWTH University of Achen	Partner	Germany
4	Athens University of Economics and Business	Partner	Greece
5	SEED, Yezreel Valley College YVC	Partner	Israel
6	University of Haifa	Partner	Israel
7	Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei	Partner	Italy