Dear Water Europe family,
Lisbon. The Autumn Board Meeting took place on 23-24 October, hosted by our member, Aguas do Portugal. We had some very interesting interventions from DG ENV and DG RTD, regarding the priorities for a new Commission, and plans for an all-new Water Partnership. Keep posted for more on this to come early 2020.
At this board meeting, a series of important proposals have been validated by the Board. The proposal to increase Water Europe’s engagement with pertinent water policy dossiers, and to reinforce staff, and services to members to make such an activity more effective, has been endorsed. The Board has also accepted Water Europe to become a founding member of the UN World Water Quality Alliance.
On more general, but not less important ground, the Board also accepted unanimously a clear willingness and engagement by Water Europe to be representative of society’s diversity in all its governance bodies. As such we make public our commitment to communicate, propose and implement specific actions leading to gender equality at Board, Cluster and Working Group level by 2022.
From Lisbon to Brussels. Water Knowledge Europe (WKE) edition concluded last week in Brussels. This was our last edition for H2020 Calls and as usual a big success. A compact and highly interesting programme, 250 B2B meetings in 2 hours, 13 Working Group meetings. I am pleased to see that the attendants that I had the opportunity to speak with, value as a most effective, valuable and result-oriented tool to exchange, meet, discuss, and promote projects and consortia.
We took advantage of WKE to present and launch a new WE publication: Analyses & Overview of WE members’ European Projects, you can download this document from our web site, and I suggest warmly you do just that. The key fact and the best possible reason to realize how much has been done in so little time: Water Europe members cover 74% of all water-related H2020 project participations!
From Brussels to Amsterdam. I had the chance to represent Water Europe at the Industry Leaders Forum 2019, as part of the Amsterdam International Water Week. It is a pleasure and reason for pride to confirm that the key elements of our Water Vision, very specially the concept of the Value of Water, but also our push for Water Oriented Living Labs, are being accepted, mentioned and used to construct new value proposals for better market uptake. Our ambassador programme is precisely intended to spread these concepts clearly and further.
The Board in Lisbon also decided to promote, push forward, and support our Water Europe ambassadors. An excellent and very interesting example of how you all can contribute to making the voice of water heard, as well as, opening our community to the most up to date, and valuable insights are provided by our new Guest editorial. Ilari Aho, Water Europe Ambassador has a video interview with the Minister for Environment and Climate Change, Krista Mikkonen in light of the EU Finnish Presidency.
Water Europe. Do more. Do better.
