General objectives

Numerous past, present and future INCO projects were, are and will be concerned with research in the area of water resource management in the South Mediterranean region. Despite their close rela-tionships in this scientific domain, little cross-project co-ordination or information exchange has happened. Synergy and cross-fertilisation among the projects largely remained a vision. Consequently, also a wide dissemination of the results achieved to future users and fellow researchers did not happen. Naturally, news about projects and their subjects are spread by individual partners in the region, but then again only for their own projects.
Since no ongoing research project can take up co-ordination and dissemination for a large number of other projects, this has to be done by a specific project, and this is what MedAqua will do:

• · bring these projects closer together,
• · assess the emerging scientific progress and identify the future needs for research in the water management area, and
• · ensure a widespread dissemination of their activities and results in the Middle East region.

A prerequisite for any form of synergy of disparate groups or actors is information about their ac-tivities and contacts with the players involved in them.
The MedAqua workshop and the MedAqua interactive WEB site will provide both of these re-quirements. MedAqua sees itself as a forum and hence as a means to make such synergy happen. Co-operation itself has to come from the projects involved in this cluster. Synergy and co-operation is a process that takes time and in practice often needs more than one catalytic event. MedAqua is seen as the first step in such process by bringing the involved parties together: physically in a joint workshop and virtually on the Internet.
To achieve a strategic impact by capturing the scientific development in this field and identifying its direction taking into account the changing needs of the countries involved, a continuation of this measure is planned for the future.
Specific objectives
In order to bring projects closer together this project will carry out a number of dissemination and communication activities on different levels:

1) One Joint Conference (public) will be organised. It will take place towards the end of this project in Month 14 to give new projects sufficient time to develop first results worth dis-seminating.
2) A "Roadmap" document at the end of the project defining the future needs of research in this area, based on the result achieved in the ongoing projects.
3) A WEB forum will be created for a) private discussions among the relevant projects and with a repository of documents and reports the projects want to exchange among them-selves; and b) public news and bulleting board to report on the scientific achievements and relevant events.
4) A number of local activities by the Mediterranean partners: Primarily through seminars at the participating universities but also through lectures within the relevant educational courses.
5) In Europe dissemination will take place through presentations by the European partners at relevant conferences and workshops.