InnoWater to promote water management and innovation in Cyprus

The European Commission and the European Water Partnership signed a contract for the commencement of the InnoWater project, an advance partnership aimed at promoting better innovation support tools and delivery mechanisms in sustainable water and wastewater.
InnoWater, with an estimated budget of EUR 1.5 mln, will start its activities on February 1, 2010 in the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain and the UK, with Atlantis Consulting undertaking the Cyprus project with a budget of EUR 200,000.
“The project aims to review and promote technological innovation and better energy management, whether this is in the large-scale water desalination sector or the small-scale automated water pumps on farms operated by solar power,” Atlantis Managing Director Charalambos Panayiotou told the Financial Mirror.
“Initially, we will look to review and assess water infrastructure on the island,” he added, as Atlantis’ expertise is in environmental management and systems innovation.
InnoWater, supported by the European Commission Europe Innova programme, is a public private partnership of innovation agencies, water associations and technology specialists, innovation experts and eco-innovative cluster organisations from Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, coordinated by the EWP.
According to InnoWater, one of the most important challenges that Europe will face in the 21st century is water quality and availability, which threatens its sustainable development and economic growth and has a large impact on health around the continent. Europe has the mechanisms to address these challenges, but their effective implementation is deficient. This clearly also holds true for the implementation of new and innovative technologies.
Acknowledgement in Europe is growing regarding new technologies which will have a fundamental role to play in addressing the water challenges. Within Europe, a large amount of innovative technologies are developed, but they face difficulties in reaching the market.
This is the gap that InnoWater is aiming to address, which will mainly happen by establishing and implementing a water innovation partnership that develops and tests new and improved innovation support tools, as well as delivery mechanisms for innovative SMEs and first-user industries.
More detailed information about InnoWater will be made available at www.atlantis-consulting.eu  from February 2010.