Call: PRIMA WEFE NEXUS Award 2022

Objective

Awards have a strong potential to drive innovation by recognising achievements and promoting role models.

In this regard, PRIMA plans to award a monetary recognition prize dedicated to promoting scientific research and demonstrating the economic and social benefits of the Water Energy Food and Ecosystem (WEFE) Nexus in the Mediterranean Area: the PRIMA WEFE Nexus Award.

The PRIMA WEFE Nexus Award is assigned to “research teams and practitioners” that have devised and demonstrated the successful implementation of combined management practices of water, energy, food and ecosystem resources at the local or regional scale of the Mediterranean Region.

The award enables teams to showcase their best practices and achievements. This will encourage researchers to use and manage their results in the best way possible.

PRIMA will award two winners, with a recognition prize of 10 000 EUR to each of them.

The PRIMA Nexus Award will provide the winner of each of the two Prizes with high visibility in the public interest and increased media coverage. PRIMA will further promote each of the two Prizes’ winners by inviting them to provide testimony at other significant events such as the PRIMA_EU workshop on “The way forward on research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Region.”

The contest’s specific rules[1] will be published on the PRIMA website as soon as the PRIMA 2022 calls will be public and actively disseminated elsewhere to maximise participation.

Contestants will have to provide proof of eligibility[2] and a written description of their achievements in the field of the PRIMA WEFE Nexus award, which will be presented to an independent panel of experts for evaluation.

Amount of prize:

Prize Amount(s): two awards of EUR 10 000 each

Budget of the prizes: EUR 20 000

Eligibility criteria:

The contestants for the PRIMA prizes should be at least one legal entity established in a PRIMA PS.^[3] The demonstrated practices must be implemented in the Mediterranean Region.

Prizes will not be awarded to teams including employees of PRIMA or serving on one of the PRIMA advisory (Scientific Advisory Committee) or governing (Board of Trustees and Steering Committee) boards.

Please also note that participants who have already received an EU or Euratom prize cannot receive a second prize for the same activities.

Award criteria: An independent panel of experts will evaluate all eligible applications.

The prizes will be awarded, after the closure of the contest, to the contestant(s) who, in the opinion of the panel, best addresses the following criteria:

In addition to their scientific excellence, the proposed solutions should,

• demonstrate the more comprehensive socio-economic benefits of their proposed practices going beyond a fragmented system of sectors and players;
• demonstrate that they have directly exploited their proposed solutions or have played an active role in the uptake of the results by third parties, in particular, influencing policy change;
• demonstrate the replication and upscaling potential of the proposed Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems Nexus solutions;

Type of action: Recognition prizes.

Indicative timetable: Prize contests will be launched in the first quarter of 2022 and remain open until the second quarter of 2022. (see Section 5.1.5 for Model Rules of Contest (RoC) PRIMA Prizes).

^[1] The PRIMA WEFE Nexus award rules of contest will be adopted by the Director of PRIMA.IS

^[2] The contestants for the PRIMA prizes should be at least one legal entity established in a PRIMA PS. The demonstrated practices must be implemented in the Mediterranean Region

^[3] The latest information on the PRIMA PS can be found on PRIMA webpage: http://prima-med.org