HYDROUSA will provide innovative, regenerative and circular solutions for (1) nature-based water management of Mediterranean coastal areas, closing water loops; (2) nutrient management, boosting the agricultural and energy profile; and (3) local economies, based on circular value chains. The services provided lead to a win-win-win situation for the economy, environment and community within the water-energy-food-employment nexus. HYDROUSA water loops will include water from non-conventional sources including wastewater, rainwater, seawater, groundwater and vapour water, all resulting in recovered and marketable products. HYDROUSA will demonstrate at large scale the feasibility and sustainability of innovative, low-cost water treatment technologies to recover freshwater, nutrients and energy from wastewater, salt and freshwater from seawater, and freshwater from atmospheric water vapour. Water conservation solutions including aquifer storage and sustainable agricultural practices including fertigation will be applied. The solutions will be demonstrated on 3 major touristic islands in Greece. Detailed technical and financial deployment plans will be established for replication in additional 25 locations worldwide. Through the on-site water loops of HYDROUSA, complex supply chains for resource recovery are not required, as producers are directly involved as consumers of derived products. HYDROUSA will combine traditional skilled workmanship with modern ICT integration in beautiful and smart automation systems. HYDROUSA will revolutionise water value chains in Mediterranean areas and beyond, from water abstraction to sewage treatment and reuse. The proposed HYDROUSA solutions show massive potential to change the way humans interact with water, food and energy.

Climate projections for the Middle East and North African (MENA) region indicate warmer and drier conditions with increased frequency of natural disasters. Agriculture is one of the most vulnerable economic sectors to climate change, mainly due to the limited availability of water and land resources in the two target MENA countries (Egypt and Jordan). There is future risk of higher skills shortages in ‘niche’ areas related to the impact of climate change to agricultural sectors and food production. In particular, there is need for highly specialised scientists in the field of agriculture and food security who want to combine scientific and social or policy skills to better understand and make significant contributions to climate adaptation and mitigation in agriculture and food security. It is critical to integrate agricultural science with related subjects that impact on sustainability and food security such as geo-politics, legislation and regulation, consumer pressures, economics, agro-ecology and environmental stewardship, especially at the post-graduate level. An inter/multidisciplinary MSc programme in Climate Change, Agricultural Development and Food Security (CCSAFS) is urgently needed. CCSAFS is driven by the Bologna process and a multi-stakeholder approach advanced through a participatory or negotiated curriculum, innovative methodologies such as the 10Cs transversal skills in a problem-based learning environment enabled by ICTs, blended learning, SDGs and agro-food entrepreneurship in teaching, learning and outreach activities. Graduates will be equipped with interdisciplinary knowledge and agro-food entrepreneurship and ethics to promote sustainable agricultural production, food security and climate change adaptation. CCSAFS will help to overcome the threats to agriculture and food security in a changing climate, exploring new ways of helping vulnerable rural communities to compact hunger and adjust to local, regional and global changes in climate.

According to the EU Soil Strategy, around 60 to 70% of the soils in the European Union are not healthy and suffering from severe degradation processes. The degradation processes primarily affecting the topsoils are also depleting the subsoil health reducing the ecosystem services delivery. However, subsoil knowledge is scarce in spite of the relevance it has. SUS-SOIL is a 4-year project adopting multidisciplinary approach that will develop a set of 15 Subsoil-Living Labs (LLs) to inventory, analyse and benchmark different agroecology subsoil management (ASM) and land uses and their impacts on the subsoil spatial variations and dynamics to best combine ASM practices in rural and urban areas within a global regional context. SUS-SOIL results will be the start point to increase the awareness of land managers and public authorities to understand the subsoil threats and risks, support EU agroecological transformation tackling subsoils and increasing ecosystem services delivery, promote water security and climate change mitigation of rural and urban ecosystems. The main outcomes include: (1) develop a subsoil/soil monitoring database (S-DB) able to be interoperable with the LUCAS and ESDAC databases, (ii) the analysis long-term ASM land use and management of 3 relevant types of soil per LL and the relationship with rural and urban ecosystem services delivery including modelling, (iii) develop a set of farm idiotypes per LL mixing the ASM best practices as an alternative to conventional systems to enhance the ecosystem services provision at regional level for citizens through (iv) a Subsoil Decision Support Tool (S-DST) considering soil degradation and relevant business models and propose a (v) subsoil policy strategy framework to foster ASM best practices.

Egyptian emigrants to the big cities or crossing the Mediterranean to Europe are most often young men belonging to rural rather than urban areas. Migrants and refugees move to Europe driven from their country of origin (“push factors”) and because they are drawn to Europe (“pull factors”). The challenge to be addressed in this project is reducing the number of people seeking to leave the countryside or their countries due to the lack of attractive prospects. In Egypt, agriculture and rural regions clearly remain a source of resilience for many families in the face of economic shocks. This project supports the Egyptian rural-community with the necessary qualified graduates and university expertise to improve agricultural productivity, enable more sustainable food production, develop the poor villages, enhance farmers’ income and their living conditions to prevent migration to cities or abroad. The project has five specific objectives that can be summarized as follows: 1. To identify the push factors for migration from rural communities and identify the needed qualifications to support rural development. 2. Modification and re-orientation of the existing post- and undergraduate curricula to supply the market with graduates who contribute in the implementation of the country’s sustainable development vision and ensure the sustainable rural development. 3. Establishing four DeVilage Service Offices at the four Egyptian universities to provide technical support for the farmers and public and private sectors. 4. To develop a capacity building programme to train and equip the professors in the Egyptian universities with the knowledge and tools to address the different dimensions of sustainable agriculture and rural development.5. To develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as Open Education Resources (OER) for spreading the knowledge and raising the awareness of different stakeholders.

The Middle East and North African region has faced one of the most critical refugee crises, with global consequences, especially for EU. Egypt has received more than 400,000 refugees from Syria alone with 30,000 of them being of school age and only 50% enrolled in public schools. While Syrian refugee children are allowed to enroll in public schools, the majority go to refugee schools organized by the Syrian community, since Egyptian teachers lack skills to tackle the needs of refugee learners. Refugee children are a unique learner group due to their prior traumatic experiences. There is need of a pedagogy focusing on refugees that most teachers, even refugee ones, do not possess. Refugee teachers in Egypt, estimated to 4,000, face considerable constraints in accessing certified in-service training. NGOs and other organizations have gone some way to addressing refugee children’s schooling, but their interventions are very limited and not tied to educational pathways that lead to certified lasting programs. Both Egyptian and refugee teachers should undergo training to gain awareness of the refugee experience as well as the cultural backgrounds of refugee learners so that they can be responsive to refugee needs and sensitive to trauma reactions. These problems and challenges could be tackled through the development of an innovative in-service teacher certification program enabled by blended learning, established in the faculties of education. ReTeCp responds to a cross-cutting priority by giving access to refugee teachers to the Egyptian HEIs through a post-graduate diploma focusing on these issues. By the end of ReTeCp project, about 700 teachers, including refugee teachers will be trained and in the next 4-6 years years all refugee teachers and an increasing number of Egyptian teachers will be undergoing life-long certified training that will highly contribute to the right of refugee children for quality education (SDG4) in the host countries.