Background WSES2025:

WSES2025 focusses on centralized and decentralized circular water and wastewater treatment solutions including resource recovery. The focus in all themes lies at the intersection of technological and non-technological aspects, highlighting their interplay and importance for full scale implementation. It includes political, economic, regulatory and social enablers and barriers.

These following parallel sessions cover aspects needed for a future Water-smart Economy & Society: 

Sessions

• Scaling up water solutions 
  Scaling of conceptual frameworks to real world implementation requires strategies to bridge the gap between proof of principle to lab scale to pilot projects and to widespread adoption, emphasizing innovative technologies, scalable business models, and supportive policy environments. This session showcases approaches to mainstreaming circular water and wastewater solutions including resource recovery from different perspectives.
  
  
• Circular Value Chains & Business Models I: LIFE JURY Panel
  Circular economy requires innovative value chains and business models that facilitate resource efficiency. Yet many promising solutions struggle to gain traction. Start-ups, which are often at the forefront of driving innovation, face barriers in scaling and accelerating market uptake of circular technologies. In this session we invite pitches of the EU LIFE program and a Jury will reflect and provide feedback those examples and strategies of circular water innovations and point towards potential barriers that prevent circular solutions reaching the market.
  
  
• Capacity Building & Education
  Capacity building in the water sector ensures the dissemination of knowledge, innovation, and best practices across the water value chain, which is essential for equipping professionals, citizens, and students with the diverse skill sets required to allow a transition to and circular water economy. Only with capacity building a circular economy can be maintained and improved. This transition demands not only advanced technical skills but also interdisciplinary competencies that bridge technical expertise with social sciences. Combining technical training with these broader skills equips stakeholders at all levels to innovate, collaborate, and drive systemic change in the water sector. In this session we present innovative educational strategies and capacity-building programs that blend technical training with social science competencies in the water sector.
   
• Transition Management & Stakeholder Engagement
  The transitioning to circular water systems requires solving of technical, institutional, and behavioral challenges. Transition management provides a framework for guiding this process through participatory planning, adaptive governance, and innovation facilitation. This session shows strategies to enable systemic change while managing uncertainties and ensuring stakeholder alignment in water management. Methodologies and tools for managing transitions in circular water systems are presented. The session includes participatory approaches and strategies for promoting collaboration among diverse stakeholders.
   
• Climate Resilience & Water Security
  Building climate resilience and ensuring water security are essential ingredients for a sustainable circular economy. The integration of circular water practices can reduce vulnerability to climate impacts by enhancing water reuse, improving resource efficiency, and securing alternative water sources. This track explores the synergies between circular economy practices and climate adaptation strategies to develop resilient water systems. The session covers adaptive water management, the role of nature-based solutions and resilience-building measures in water-stressed regions.
   
• Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) Nexus & Smart Policy Integration  
  The WEFE Nexus underscores the interconnectedness of water, energy, food, and ecosystems, highlighting the need for integrated solutions to manage these interdependencies sustainably. Smart policies are critical for balancing competing demands and promoting collaboration across sectors. This track session covers policy integration and nexus-based approaches to advance circular water practices.
  
  
• Sustainability Impact Assessment
  Quantifying the sustainability impacts of circular water practices is essential for guiding decision-making, policy development, and promoting accountability. Smart monitoring tools and frameworks enable real-time data collection and analysis, enhancing the ability to track progress and optimize circular water systems. This track focuses on methodologies for assessing and monitoring sustainability impacts.
  
  

Other sessions

• Panel I (Sunday): Connecting energy, water and food in circular transition
  The panel will feature experts from public and private institutions with different perspectives to discuss challenges, opportunities and solutions to take (local) energy and food requirements into account in providing access to clean water, addressing local requirements such as energy and food. Local circumstances provide different challenges and hence require different solutions. Are we engineering the right solutions? What data do we need to design the best options? How to decide on which priorities pertain? How to embed climate change resilience in the water-food-energy solution systems? What is the role of stakeholder engagement and how best to interact for embedded and accepted solutions?
  
  
• Panel II (Wednesday): Smart policies, geopolitical challenges and green deals
  The world is presently challenged with rapidly changing geopolitical sensitivities that alters our needs for sovereignty and autonomy, while the climate change challenge is still urgent. Water access, and therefore water purification, wastewater treatment and desalination need to be revisited: what materials can and need to be recovered and produced from wastewater; how can we decrease energy needs and how can we design policies that provide the incentives to invest in such systems? Which policies are most effective in times of uncertainty and how can we develop solutions that both improve our footprint and ensure independency for local and regional communities? The panel, featuring experts from public and private institutions with different perspectives, will discuss these aspects and strategies how challenges can be addressed.
  
  
• White paper session
  The Water Mining project has, together with its sister projects in the EU Horizon program on Smart Water Economy and Society, delivered numerous smart solutions for pending water management challenges. It uniquely combined perspectives from stakeholders and expert to co-create solutions that are trusted and welcomed by those who needs them. The projects also uncovered lessons on how to develop this inter- and transdisciplinary approach, bringing sustainability impact analysis and business opportunities together with technological innovation and stakeholder needs. The International Water Association aims to support a new 'specialist group' to further develop these approaches and bring the novel solutions to more parts of the world. To start this initiative the congress aims to present, discuss and agree on a "What Paper on Smart Water Economy and Society", highlighting the novel approaches and remaining research questions. This session will present and discuss this paper with the aim to reach an agreed document which can be presented to the IWA.