AQUACYCLE – My Autobiography – sharing outcomes of virtual meetings
Since my last appearance on the occasion of the rolestorming session in Malta in February, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic changed my travel plans rather abruptly. However, as my creators quickly took to organizing virtual online meetings on a weekly basis, I owe you quite a few updates by now.
For starters, I listened in to an interview with Pedro Simón Andreu, AQUACYCLE Teamleader and Technical Director of the Regional Entity for Wastewater Sanitation and Treatment in Murcia (ESAMUR) in Spain.
I was all ears as Pedro shared the outcomes of monitoring for the prevalence of virus RNA in municipal wastewater.
“Our most recent studies have corroborated how the monitoring of municipal wastewater can serve both as an early indicator of the virus prevalence in a community and help authorities to coordinate the exit strategy to gradually lift coronavirus lock-down measures.”
Next was an interview in which Dr. Vasilios Takavakoglou, my Innovation Manager from the Centre of Research and Technology, Hellas (CERTH) brought an overview of how several of the originally planned research activities in the AQUACYCLE work plan have been updated in response to the virus pandemic.
“The knowledge that aside from Greece and Spain, also our research partners in Lebanon and Tunisia bring expert staff and laboratory facilities, has indeed motivated us to update several of our planned activities, which are now more strongly focused on microbiological quality aspects”.
I was most happy to hear also from my family again. Indeed, the Joint Technical Secretariat in Sardinia had much welcomed the earlier initiative by Dr. Konstantinos Plakas, my Project Manager at CERTH, to bring together the 5 ENI CBC Med funded projects that share the same emerald waterdrop in their logos. The clustering initiative has since been announced also through the May-June 2020 Flash issued by the Euro-Mediterranean Information System on the know-how in the Water Sector (EMWIS), inviting similarly oriented projects to “Join forces”.
“The mutual aspiration of AQUACYCLE, MEDISS, MENAWARA, NAWAMED and PROSIM in finding innovative and technological solutions to increase water efficiency and encourage the use of non-conventional water resources brings a real opportunity for each individual project to achieve more by joining forces!”
You are welcome to read up more on these interviews in the Special Issue of my e-Newsletter on COVID-19 and the Urban Water Cycle in Arabic, English, French, Greek or Spanish!
And last but not least, I can proudly announce to now have my very own dedicated channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/c/AQUACYCLE_ENI_CBCMed
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