Cairo
Site: Large metropolitan area with 20 million inhabitants in Egypt - the largest in Africa, the Arab world, and the Middle East, and among the top 10 largest in the world.
Situation: Cairo suffers severe water scarcity and local authorities are promoting wastewater reuse. NICE nature-based solutions for wastewater will be validated under very high temperatures, and irrigation by pottery drippers (reducing water salinity) will be tested. In addition, the Nile river, the longest in Africa, is overexploited and suffers increasing pollution. Ismaïlia Canal that conducts Nile river water through southeast Cairo will allow validating NICE river basin restoration nature-based solution and assessing the improvement in river water quality.
Solution: Treatment of 5 m3/d of wastewater and 10 m3/d for river basin restoration with hybrid subsurface wetlands.
The NICE Urban Real Labs are ideal test beds for nature-based solutions for circular urban water solutions, as they have varied geographical, environmental and socioeconomic characteristics.
The Urban Real Labs cover a wide range of climate zones: tropical and subtropical (Pereira and Turin), Mediterranean (Talavera, Algeciras, Benalmádena, Lyon, Cairo), transition climate with extreme temperatures (Madrid), oceanic (Vigo, Aarhus), and Baltic (Gdansk).
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.101003765.