The IMRR project won the European Foundations Award for Responsible Research and Innovation (EFARRI).

The EFARRI award aims to identify research groups that have successfully incorporated methods to align research with the needs of society and contributed towards the development of a smart, inclusive and sustainable society.

The IMRR team from the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria of the Politecnico di Milano, led by Prof. Rodolfo Soncini Sessa, includes Prof. Andrea Castelletti, Enrico Weber and other researchers, post-docs, Ph.D students and expert consultants, from Italy and VietNam. They worked to develop and promote strategies for the sustainable and participatory management of water resources in the Red-Thai Binh River (RTBR) system, the largest river basin in Vietnam. This region is experiencing rapid population and economic growth. To accommodate this growth and preserve the river, the IMRR approach combines coordinated decision-making and stakeholder participation, supported by advanced modelling and optimisation tools, and capacity building in local institutions. The aim is to build tools and knowledge to analyse trade-offs, considering human water uses, ecosystem needs and natural disaster risk management. Partners of the project were the Institute of Water Resources Planning (IWRP) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) of VietNam. Donor was the Italian Development Cooperation Agency.

The EFARRI call was launched on September 14th 2015. In total 214 projects were submitted before December 8th 2015. Between December 2015 and March 2016 four pre-selection rounds took place to reduce the amount of applications from 214 to 15. Eventually the IMRR project was chosen as one of them and on November 21st was announced as one of the three winners of the EFARRI award.

Please see the Award certificate attached.

Further information is available at:

http://efarri.eu/
http://xake.elet.polimi.it/imrr/