ICRA Projects

PRIMA-SAFE “Sustainable water reuse practices improving safety in agriculture, food and environment” (2022-2025) is a PRIMA project coordinated by Università degli Studi della Basilicata (Italy), with other 11 partners (including ICRA) and a budget of almost 2.1 M€ (funded 1.5 M€).

PRIMA-SAFE focuses on smallholders’ farms in Mediterranean areas affected by water scarcity, farms providing in some areas from 60 to 80% of the food and, due to the increase of the world population, under growing pressure especially in rural poor regions. PRIMA-SAFE will optimize innovative water reuse strategies, ensuring their safety both for environment and human health and more sustainable agriculture production systems, through an integrated water perspective. PRIMA-SAFE will: a) develop, validate, and optimise novel low-cost and low-energy urban decentralized wastewater treatment and reuse; b) evaluate their impact on crops performance, using modern -omics tools, and on local biodiversity; c) monitor emerging pollutants in water, soil, and produced crops and evaluate the safety of the proposed approaches; d) minimise the impacts and promote environment respectful practices, like pest management by biofertilizers; e) locally promote farmers’ acceptability.

ICRA, leading task 1.1, will characterise selected emerging pollutants in crops (e.g., tomatoes, oregano, and lettuce) grown on-site (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Greece). ICRA is leading WP2, and it will also perform environmental and human health risk assessment of irrigation practices based on the characterization of water, soils, and crops.