€10 million funding hinges on renting 6 hectares with access to sea within a radius of 1 to 5 kms. A world-first solution that promises not only to bring water to the Algarve but transform the region into a ‘new European destination for science’, is in an 11th hour scramble for ‘the right location’.
‘Projet CisWEFE-NEX’ is an acronym for ‘Circular Systemic Water Energy Food Ecosystem Nexus’ - and if that explains very little to the lay reader, Artur Gregório of In Loco - the Algarve’s local development NGO, focused on social and economic development in the Algarve - gives his interpretation: “It’s ingenious”.
“Critical problems” like water scarcity and drought “can be transformed sustainably”, he explains. “The system is quite literally all about our goals at In Loco: organic farming, electricity production, agri-photovoltaics (meaning the cultivation of crops beneath photovoltaic panels). It’s got everything… except the land it needs for this crucial research and development stage.
“The problem”, stresses Gregório, “is that if we cannot find the location by April / May, the promise of €10 million funding from Horizon Europe will be lost. It would be a drama! We have been working on this concept for years. It’s too much to think that we couldn’t take it to the next level”.
In Loco is one of 27 partners from nine countries in this project, which is the brainchild of environmental scientist Sascha Iqbal, who ‘divides his time’ between Switzerland and the Algarve.
Iqbal explains that he was listening to the media stories of gathering drought in the Algarve “back in 2019, and wondering what I could do. I am not a politician; I am not an activist. I thought, perhaps I can find a contributing solution with science and technology”.
And so this extraordinary idea developed.
CisWEFE-NEX has an online video which outlines the concept; reams of technical data, and it has certainly satisfied the Horizon Europe programme to the extent that it has been assured €10 million in funding. But that money can only come through if there is the land on which to site the infrastructure, all of which will be ‘on wheels’/ able to be dismantled at the end of a 5-year research and development phase.
As Iqbal stressed, this is not a system that can cater for the entire Algarve. It is much more a decentralised one that businesses/ hotels/ resorts/ golf courses / farms and farming cooperatives/ saltern owners and such like, would use to generate their own electricity, produce their own water, create co-products for onward sale/ own consumption.
But whereas central government plans, for example, for a desalination plant in Albufeira could only ever create water for 100,000 people - and would pollute the sea (because of untreated brine discharge) and create large quantities of CO2, this system has virtually no environmentally-unfriendly or unsustainable consequences.
The desalination part of the process will be chemical-free, and the brine will thus be able to be repurposed as table/ Epsom salts - not channelled, ultimately destructively, back into the ocean.
But as the video indicates, there is so much more to CisWEFE-NEX than creating drinking and irrigation water: it uses olive mill waste to extract high-value bio-phenols; agri-food waste to create biogas, and agri-voltaics to create energy to power the desalination and biophenol extraction plants and help produce crops/ food.
In simple terms, it’s a highly integrated system in which everything works together, making use of all that comes in and all that goes out, in a constant loop ‘at one with Nature’.
CisWEFE-NEX has done the rounds of every one of the Algarve’s - and some of the Alentejo’s - municipalities, and they have all been hugely ‘enthusiastic’, without being able to come up with one possible site.
“It has to have access either to seawater or brackish water within a radius of 1 to 5 kms (or less)”, explains Sascha Iqbal. “We have a couple of ‘possibilities’, but they are nowhere near the stages we need them to be. One, for example, is on land classified as RAN/ REN, and legally, these lands are not available to a project of this kind. We are working on it, but time is moving on…”.
Thus, this is an attempt to highlight this transformative project in the hope that someone somewhere may read the text and think: ‘Maybe I/ we should be on the right side of the search for sustainability’.
Certainly, Artur Gregório believes developing this project locally would promote the Algarve as "a new European destination for science; a circular economy lighthouse at world level. Really".
For further information, contact Artur Gregório at the In Loco association, email: geral@in-loco.pt .
CisWEFE-NEX flow chart (click on interactive elements) and background info can be found HERE.
Source: Adapted from https://www.portugalresident.com with the permission of the author (Natasha Donn).
