Holistic approaches for effective monitoring of water quality in urban areas
Closed
Status as published by the data source.
Expected Outcome:In line with the European Green Deal’s zero pollution ambition, successful proposals will contribute to protecting water quality by managing urban water pollution, and consequently also protecting biodiversity and the quality of aquatic ecosystems, as addressed by several impacts under the Destination ‘Clean environment and zero pollution’, in particular “Move towards achieving clean, unpolluted surface water and groundwater bodies in the EU by advancing the understanding of diffuse and point sources of water pollution in a global and climate change context, enabling novel solutions to avoid degradation and restore water bodies, aquatic ecosystems and soil functionality, and further enhancing water quality and its management for safe human and ecological use, while fostering the EU’s and Associated Countries’ position and role in the global water scene.”
Projects results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:
• Enhance urban water quality with a view of providing better guidance for policy making and prioritisation by developing integrated urban water quality monitoring management plans;
• Sound, safer and risk-based urban water quality management plans supported by enhanced holistic monitoring, advanced novel methods and digital solutions, modelling and evidence-based scenarios;
• Increase uptake of digital tools in the water sector to support water management decisions for all stakeholders. Scope:Water management in urban areas is confronted with a wide range of water quality issues. Urban runoff, is an increasingly important source of pollution. This is going to be aggravated by an increasing frequency of extreme events, such as floods and droughts, due to the impacts of climate change, as well as the increasing sealing of surfaces and rapid growth of urban areas. Moreover, water leakages from ageing water-service infrastructure and combined sewer or storm water overflows, leads to additional pollution releases into the environment. Water quality deterioration due to trace organic pollutants such as pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, microbial contaminants, such as pathogens or antimicrobial resistance genes, micro-plastic, nanomaterial, and diffuse pollution from urban areas (roads, urban runoff) and from upstream agricultural areas or industries and many other pollutants often released unintentionally to the environment and finally leading to several forms of pollution of urban water sources. These issues are also exacerbated by the complex interactions between pollutions sources and pathways at the urban/catchment level interface.
In line with the ambition of the EU zero pollution action plan there is a need to develop an integrated and harmonised approach to monitor all sources of surface and groundwater pollution and their impact, including micro-pollutants, micro-plastics, pharmaceuticals and other contaminant of emerging concerns, as well as mixtures of pollutants.
This objective of this action is to develop and demonstrate a European wide ‘whole system monitoring approach’ to address emerging water pollution and water quality assurance in urban areas in various urban areas covering a wide number of water pollution challenges, , taking into consideration the interactions of pollution sources and pathways between urban areas and the surrounding river and where appropriate drainage basin, and improve the resilience of urban water systems towards pandemics and global and climate change challenges. New systemic concepts and holistic strategies to enhance urban water quality should be integrated and demonstrated in an operational environment, including decentralised systems, hybrid green-grey infrastructures or cascading use of water.
An advanced monitoring and control system, going beyond the conventional pollutants, linking drinking and wastewater urban cycles, integrating risk management approaches and exploiting upgraded digital solutions to support urban water quality management, should be developed and tested, combined with appropriate modelling tools and scenarios to assess and forecast the long-term impacts of future changing socio-economic and climatic conditions on water quality. This monitoring system should consider the overall monitoring and outlook requirements of the EU zero pollution action plan, the monitoring requirements of existing EU water policy legislation (e.g., Water Framework Directive, Drinking Water Directive , Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, Bathing Water Directive, etc.) and relevant national and/or European water quality monitoring tools, and develop recommendations and guidance to strengthen the implementation of the EU and/or national legislation. It should allow to identify cause-effect relationships and big data management to address quality pressures For this purpose there is a need to develop better methods to access chemical data to be able to track the use or the flows of chemicals in urban areas (e.g., to support case studies using mass balance approach to clarify hotspots of pollution sources). New and refined analytical tools and monitoring methods (e.g. effect-based monitoring, biological monitoring) to analyse broad spectrum of contaminants of emerging concerns should be also developed. Recommendations for the standardisation of monitoring and identification of contaminants (including detection limit) should be also provided.
To enhance the capabilities of real-time monitoring of water quality, the potential of earth observations technologies and the use of digital technologies, such as online sensors, artificial intelligence, digital twins, digital data spaces, etc. should be further explored and consolidated.
In general, the participation of academia, research organisations, utilities, industry and regulators is strongly advised, as well as civil society engagement whenever necessary, also aiming to broaden the dissemination and exploitation routes and to better assess the innovation potential of developed solutions and strategies. The direct participation of urban and catchment/river basin managing water authorities and utilities is essential.
Where relevant, activities should create synergies with the projects funded under the protecting drinking water and managing urban water pollution topics in the work programme from WP2021-2022, namely HORIZON-CL6-2021-ZEROPOLLUTION-01-03 and HORIZON-CL6-2022- ZEROPOLLUTION-01-04.
- Status
- Closed
- Deadline
- (time not stated)
- Opens
- Published
- Total budget
- €15,000,000
- Grant range
- €5,000,000 – €5,000,000
- Country
- European Union (EU-wide)
- Programme
- Horizon Europe (HORIZON)
- Official page
- Open at the source portal
Other calls under Horizon Europe (HORIZON)
- PV based electrification of the economy: Designing & optimising PV systems supporting industrial electrification and promoting participation in electricity markets (EUPI-PV Partnership)
- Advanced TSO control rooms to enhance grid observability, stability and resilience
- Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADSM) for more efficient and flexible distribution grids
- Community of practice - Data-Driven Decision-Making in Energy
- Industrial processes and equipment for innovative, reliable and scalable tandem technologies (EUPI-PV Partnership)
- Integrated Approaches for Retrofitting Infrastructures with Innovative Energy Storage Technologies
- Demonstration of hydropower technologies for efficient and forward-looking refurbishment of existing hydropower plants
- Delivery of industrial CCUS clusters – Societal Readiness pilot
All calls under this programme
Similar opportunities
- Addressing aquatic pollution and biodiversity loss through nature positive solutions from source to sea
- Developing methods to assess the presence, functions and sensitivity of groundwater ecosystems
- New circular solutions and decentralised approaches for water and wastewater management
- Mission Climate adaptation, Mission Ocean & waters and Mission Soil Deal for Europe – Joint demonstration of an integrated approach to increasing landscape water retention capacity at regional scale
- Innovative technologies for zero pollution, zero-waste biorefineries
- European natural lakes: demonstration of integrated approaches for protection and restoration of natural lake ecosystems and their biodiversity
Where this came from
- Source document
- https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/data/topicDetails/horizon-cl6-2024-zeropollution-02-1-two-stage.json
- Document fingerprint
da08cf68ef4bcf73(SHA-256, first 16 hex characters)- Retrieved
- First recorded here
What has changed
- deadline changed from 2024-09-16 to 2024-09-17 on
- url first recorded as https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-cl6-2024-zeropollution-02-1-two-stage on
- currency first recorded as EUR on
- amount_max first recorded as 5000000.00 on
- amount_min first recorded as 5000000.00 on
- budget_total first recorded as 15000000.00 on
- deadline first recorded as 2024-09-16 on
- opens_on first recorded as 2023-10-16 on
- published_on first recorded as 2022-12-06 on
- status_basis first recorded as source_status on
- status first recorded as closed on
- title first recorded as Holistic approaches for effective monitoring of water quality in urban areas on
Data source
© European Union, 2026. Source: EU Funding & Tenders Portal. Reused under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU — CC BY 4.0.
Retrieved from the source on .
The source last updated this document on Wed, 05 Feb 2025 10:56:52 GMT.
Personal data of natural persons has been dissociated by quiescence.eu.
This service is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by the data publishers.