European Marine Science Applications Consortium project update
Water resource management is becoming an urgent challenge, for Europe and the world, as populations grow and requirements increase. Degradation of our coastal and estuarine waters is of particular concern to policy makers at regional, national, EU and international levels, and increasingly to the public at large.
The EMSAC project aims to address this challenge by ensuring that Europe’s knowledge resource is effectively directed towards building the mix of solutions required. These include: advanced sensing and surveillance systems, improved operational management for resource extraction including renewable energy, better management of coastal ecosystems and protected areas, techniques to minimize impacts of flooding due to sea-level rise, and advances in resource-efficient desalination.
The third work package of EMSAC recently carried out a survey and analysis of research and technology development projects and activities related to coastal water management.
This survey has identified more than 600 research and technology development projects involving the EMSAC partners over the last decade. The most recent projects (ca. 100) have been collated into a relational database, which stores detailed information such as keywords, contact details, and institutions involved.
The database has been designed to allow on-line queries, and is available through the EMSAC website http://www.emsacnet.eu. Its content reflects the actual research technology development skills available in the participating regions relevant to coastal and estuarine water management.
In order to determine if these RTD skills match the innovation priority needs flagged by the Key Markets analysis of WP2, different categories of keywords have been carefully chosen. They are now being used to carry out a gap analysis between market needs and RTD skills (WP 4) and will ultimately to lead to a Joint Action Plan (WP 5).
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