AI image depicting several European painter styles painting a chorent waterscape, made in Google’s Nano Banana 2, 2026

Introducing AGWA's response to the Call for Evidence for a water resilience research and innovation (R&I) strategy.

The European Commission's Call for Evidence sets out to build a dedicated research and innovation strategy for water resilience. It is a serious and welcome step. It does frame the challenge largely in technical and economic terms: knowledge gaps to close, technologies to develop, efficiency to raise, and competitiveness and investment to secure. Each of these things matters, and Europe is right to pursue them.

Our own experience suggests, however, that the picture is a little wider. Through the Water Resilience Tracker, applied mainly with governments outside Europe, we have learned that some of the most important parameters are often ones a technical frame can overlook or that fall in the spaces in between indicators. They lie in interpretation, in coordination across sectors and levels, in whether governance and mandates are clear, and in whether anyone is equipped and expected to act when a signal arrives. A country can hold strong data and sound plans and still struggle to keep its water systems steady under stress. We see the same constraints within Europe, and that recognition is one of the reasons AGWA will soon commence formal operations in Europe.

For a research and innovation strategy, this recognition carries a simple implication. Alongside the sciences of hydrology, materials and data, there is real value in research on the human side of the system: on governance, institutions, and politics, on how decisions are actually made, on how national ambition reaches the basin, the utility and the farm, and on who is protected when the water grows short. These are among the harder things to study, but among the most critical for whether a strategy can progress towards resilience in practice.

We offer our response in that spirit. It sets out, point by point, where we believe research and innovation could add the most and also where a wider reading of resilience would strengthen the strategy. The intention is meant to be constructive: to help a welcome initiative reach further than a technical frame alone would carry it.

Our public online response here was condensed due to formatting constraints (irony?), but was based on this more developed contribution.

The full letter is here:

ALLIANCE FOR GLOBAL WATER ADAPTATION

31 July 2026

European Commission

DG Research and Innovation, Unit B.4 (Oceans, Seas and Waters)

Submitted via the Have Your Say portal

Re: Call for Evidence on the water resilience research and innovation strategy (Ref. Ares(2026)6073850)

Dear Madam/Sir,

The Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA) welcomes the opportunity to respond to this Call for Evidence and offers these inputs in support of a strong research and innovation strategy. A structured R&I setup is necessary, and our aim is to help it succeed by drawing on field experience of where water resilience efforts run into difficulty. How well water is handled often decides whether wider climate and economic investments deliver, so two things deserve particular attention: the essential gaps that sit beyond a technology-and-efficiency frame, and the risk that well-intentioned investments lock in maladaptation. Offered constructively and following the structure of the Call, the points below show where R&I can help with both.

A. Political context, problem definition and subsidiarity

•Governance is part of the system. Coordination, mandates and incentives often decide whether a technical solution holds under stress, and responsibility for water is typically split across many parts of government. Because governance is one of the largest determinants of resilience, governance, institutional and behavioural science deserve a place among the strategy's named R&I priorities.

•Resilience is a direction of travel. It is a mutable condition that must be continually fostered and adjusted, combining robust choices that hold across a wide range of anticipated impacts with flexible ones that adjust as uncertain impacts emerge. Because a single fixed 2050 target tends to lock in today's assumptions, framing priorities as adaptation pathways with regular review points keeps investments open to revision as conditions change.

•Many decisive gaps are institutional. The Call rightly asks about knowledge gaps. In many settings the gaps that block progress lie in how decisions actually get made, in institutions, behaviour and implementation, and R&I directed there can add real value.

•Water's value is easily under-counted. A GDP-share lens overlooks the buffers and ecosystems that provide resilience yet show little near-term return, and understates water as an enabling condition that often decides whether energy, digital and agricultural investments deliver. Pairing economic value with resilience and ecosystem-service framings gives a fuller picture of what is at stake.

•Resilience is distributed unevenly. Climate and water shocks fall unevenly, so measuring resilience only in aggregate can overstate it and hide who is first to lose access and slowest to recover. Treating equity and the agency to act as part of resilience keeps R&I focused on whose systems actually hold.

B. What the initiative aims to achieve and how

•Efficiency and digital tools work best alongside buffers and institutions. Systems finely tuned for normal conditions can become more fragile under extremes, while robustness tends to live in natural buffers, redundancy and institutions. Pairing instrumentation with these turns efficiency gains into genuine resilience.

•Efficiency works best with a reallocation safeguard. The Water Efficiency First principle is sound. Pairing it with a safeguard that returns saved water to stressed systems and the environment, and with drought-reliability and ecological-flow measures, ensures efficiency gains reach resilience.

•Shared definitions close a coordination gap. Terms such as integrated water management and water availability invite divergent national interpretations. Shared definitions and methods, a natural task at EU level, reduce that gap and help surface the synergies and tradeoffs between water-using sectors, as would extending restoration to conservation, connectivity and scale, and implementation to evaluation and learning.

•Stress testing against many futures builds resilience in. Flood and drought are essential, and quality, timing and uncertainty matter alongside them, since scarcity is multi-dimensional. Robust, bottom-up stress testing helps ensure investments hold across the many plausible futures ahead.

C. Better regulation: monitoring, coordination and EU added value

•Monitoring is most useful when it measures resilience itself. It works best when it shows whether a system is becoming more resilient, and how credibly and effectively water is addressed within a plan, explicitly and implicitly. Distinguishing status, action and resilience, and treating plans as living documents that are used and updated, gives that clearer picture.

•The EU's added value is worth stating plainly. Its clearest value lies in keeping a consistent logic across national, basin and local levels, and in surfacing the shared, cross-border dependencies that call for European coordination.

•Finance is best judged by the resilience it builds. The finance that mobilises quickest can still carry maladaptation, so reading the investment journey through a resilience lens, across scales and time horizons, directs support to where it builds resilience that lasts.

From strategy to practice

A strategy succeeds when those who must apply it are equipped to do so. For many national and sub-national actors, the means to operationalise an EU strategy once it is written is the missing piece, and R&I can supply it directly. In concrete terms, we suggest the strategy:

•names water governance, institutions and behaviour as R&I priorities in their own right;

•frames its priorities as adaptation pathways with regular review points;

•pairs every efficiency target with a reallocation safeguard and an ecological-flow or drought-reliability check;

•funds technical accompaniment and shared, adaptable tools alongside research, so countries and regions can apply the results;

•commissions worked case studies and demonstrations that show what the targets look like in practice, designed for others to replicate;

•adopts resilience-relevant, decision-useful indicators that distinguish status, action and resilience, can be disaggregated to show who is protected, and build on existing national data.

We offer these points in partnership. The strategy's direction is welcome, and AGWA would gladly contribute field-tested methods to it. Through our Water Resilience Tracker, developed with national governments and partners including Deltares, IWMI and Arup, we have practical experience turning existing indicators into resilience-relevant signals, working across national, basin and local scales, and keeping equity central to how resilience is measured. We would be glad to share this experience, along with the tools, accompaniment and case studies it has produced.

Yours sincerely,

Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA)

secretariat@alliance4water.org

www.alliance4water.org

https://www.waterresiliencetracker.cc

www.alliance4water.org

1

Europe, August 12th 2026

Dani Gaillard-Picher and Nikolai Sindorf

Enjoy reading essays like this? Please subscribe to the AGWA family of newsletters! You can join AGWA and subscribe here.