LOGROÑO, May 9. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The general director of Environmental Quality, Climate Change and Water, José María Infante, has participated in the conference with the motto ‘The integral water cycle at the municipal level’, co-organized by the Civil Engineering Foundation, the College of Technical Engineers of Public Works and the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural World and Environment of the Government of La Rioja.
The regional Executive defends a new management model for public supply and sanitation operators, based on information and the adaptation of new existing technologies. For this reason, Jose María Infante has pointed out that “digitalization in urban water management, which allows the management of real data, is part of the solution to guarantee water security and lead to rational use of water.”
The objective of these conferences, which take place at the Espacio Lagares in Logroño, is to transmit the main concepts for raising awareness of the importance of water as a scarce good and to offer the basic tools so that the technical and political managers of hydraulic infrastructures urban areas can apply them when managing the integral water cycle.
Every day society is more aware of issues related to water. The current situation of drought and the decrease in water resources, reflected by all indicators, leads us to have to question our current management model of the integral water cycle.
In this sense, José María Infante has stressed that “the inefficiencies of the system, such as water losses in municipal infrastructure or their state, make us more vulnerable to specific increases in demand or reductions in resources, which are estimated between 8% and 28% less, according to some projections and models.
This lack of information on water use as a consequence of the lack of digitalization of the sector, as well as the lack of knowledge of losses in the distribution network, has led, for example, the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, to prepare the Project Strategic Plan for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE), for the digitalization of the water cycle.
In these sessions, climate change has also been addressed as one of the factors that currently affect water resources. In this way, the general director of Environmental Quality, Climate Change and Water has presented the present and future of the projects and experiences carried out by the Government of La Rioja. “The new regional platforms for comprehensive control of the urban water cycle that are being designed by both the Government of La Rioja and the Wastewater Consortium will contribute to increasing the capacity to adapt to climate change by facilitating the rational use of resources,” he has indicated.
Finally, experiences in the management of the integral water cycle, successfully implemented in several cities in Spain, have also been presented. During these sessions, concepts and solutions that can help make the urban water cycle more efficient will be discussed in depth.
