Cluster Projects

- Numerous past, present and future INCO projects were, are and will be concerned with research in the area of water resource management in the South Mediterranean region. Despite their close rela-tionships in this scientific domain, little cross-project co-ordination or information exchange has happened.

-  Synergy and cross-fertilisation among the projects largely remained a vision. Consequently, also a wide dissemination of the results achieved to future users and fellow researchers did not happen. Naturally, news about projects and their subjects are spread by individual partners in the region, but then again only for their own projects.

- Since no ongoing research project can take up co-ordination and dissemination for a large number of other projects, this has to be done by a specific project, and this is what MedAqua will do:

   • bring these projects closer together,

   • assess the emerging scientific progress and identify the future needs for research in the water management area, and

   • ensure a widespread dissemination of their activities and results in the Middle East region.

- A prerequisite for any form of synergy of disparate groups or actors is information about their ac-tivities and contacts with the players involved in them.

- The MedAqua workshop and the MedAqua interactive WEB site will provide both of these re-quirements. MedAqua sees itself as a forum and hence as a means to make such synergy happen. Co-operation itself has to come from the projects involved in this cluster. Synergy and co-operation is a process that takes time and in practice often needs more than one catalytic event. MedAqua is seen as the first step in such process by bringing the involved parties together:
 physically in a joint workshop and virtually on the Internet.

- To achieve a strategic impact by capturing the scientific development in this field and identifying its direction taking into account the changing needs of the countries involved, a continuation of this measure is planned for the future.