The need for the implementation of innovative governance of coastal aquifers taking into account the technological development as well as socio-economic factors, has become a worldwide necessity. In compliance with the challenges and scope of the PRIMA call topic 1.1.2 “Sustainable, integrated water management”, Sustain-COAST was designed to explore innovative governance approaches of coastal aquifers among multiple water users and beneficiaries, under the uncertainties posed by the changing climate conditions, in four Mediterranean countries.

Sustain-COAST “Sustainable coastal groundwater management and pollution reduction through innovative governance in a changing climate” is an R&I project co-funded by PRIMA (Section 2, 2018 programme).

Sustain-COAST intends to develop a calibrated multi-criteria decision supporting system (DSS) and a web GIS platform accessible for water stakeholders and policy makers. The DSS and platform, combined with a specific animation activity will allow the engagement of social actors in a learning process around water issues at catchment scale based on visualization of interactive thematic maps, the use of advanced technologies and tools, such as optical sensors and remote sensing capacities for a participatory monitoring of water and the use of calibrated numerical models for the time-space simulation of water quantity/quality progress.

The MEDSAL Project aims to secure the availability and quality of groundwater reserves in Mediterranean coastal areas, which are amongst the most vulnerable regions in the world to water scarcity and quality degradation. This will be addressed by providing a novel holistic approach, towards the sustainable management of coastal aquifers, which are affected by increased (single or multi-induced) groundwater salinization risk, especially under the variable meteo-climatic conditions of the Mediterranean and the rapidly changing socio-economic context.

MEDSAL aims at developing innovative methods to identify various sources and processes of salinization and at providing an integrated set of modeling tools that capture the dynamics and risks of salinization. In this context, MEDSAL will provide a classification of groundwater salinization types for Mediterranean coasts and innovative methods to detect these types, also in complex karstic and data-scarce environments. These outcomes will be reached by better integration of hydrogeochemical and environmental isotope data with physical-based groundwater flow and transport models and advanced geostatistics. Artificial intelligence and deep learning methods will be also used to improve the detection of patterns in multi-dimensional hydrogeochemical and isotope data.

MEDSAL has been funded by PRIMA (Section 2, 2018 programme) and the European Commission.