Due to the postponement of our training week in Wales of EJWP1, the presentations of the projects – worked on for the last three months – were presented 9 March 2020 via an online platform. The positive side of this is that people interested from all around Europe could join!
As Rosa from Italy in Lock Down said at the start we need to be ‘resilience to it all’ before starting their presentation on ‘Best practices and solutions applied in Europe for Urban Resilience against climate change.’ The project executed for Isle Utilities by Rosa Esposito (Italy), Mathilde de Jongh (The Netherlands) and Martha Gjermo (Norway).
Their observations and searches for projects on ‘Warmer, Wetter, Wilder’ weather in Norway, and also issues as drought in Italy and the Netherlands created a great insight and overview on what is being done already. The interviews within the three countries with projectleaders made it clear that it is not often the missing innovation, but the question on who wants to take the risks to try and implement the new solutions. This insight and the overview of the projects will be taken along with the initiative of Isle Utilities TAG meetings on Urban Resilience.
The second online presentation was held by Rhys Hellin from Welsh Water. Together with Ioana Dobrescu (The Netherlands/ Romania), Ingrid Keupers (Flanders) and Hedviga Horvatova (Slovakia), Rhys executed a project on ‘Putting a Price on Carbon’. The Water Industry is an industry with a high demand of energy and connected carbon footprint. Welsh Water is looking for the possibilities to reduce the carbon footprint of its organization and in the project they have set up a theory and process on how to deal with this. With the result of the project they will select a project to get approval to set up a trial.
Conclusion of our first online project presentation: the presentations were really good and learned a lot about the work and knowledge they created in their projects. Presenting online feels really different then in a room with people, since you don’t have interaction when you are presenting. Also interaction after the presentations is hard, since it is hard to intervene in an online meeting. You can not really have a discussion. It is though really nice that everyone interested just can pop in and listen. We hope next time to present in real life again, and add the online option to listen in.