Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and research partners launch the EU project AWESOME (Managing Water, Ecosystems and Food Across Sectors and Scales in the South Mediterranean)
On the 1st of May 2020 the AWESOME (Managing Water, Ecosystems and Food Across Sectors and Scales in the South Mediterranean) project has officially started. The project is part of the PRIMA (Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area) Programme supported by the European Union and involves several partners of excellence: Politecnico di Milano, Athens University of Economics and Business, Yezreel Valley College, University of Haifa, Agrimatic Farms, RWTH Aachen University and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
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 com-promise 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 trade-offs, synergies, and 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 better understand multi-sectoral WEF trade-offs and to capitalize on potential synergies, also exploring the interdependencies and feedbacks across a hierarchy of spatial scales, from the macroeconomic development of the Mediterranean region and national scale, to regional planning at the river basin scale, downscaling until the single farm.