MedRESOURCE explores how better nutrient recovery and management can protect water quality, reduce environmental pressures, and support more circular and resilient agriculture.
The World Water Week 2026 organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, this year was focused on water security and safely managed drinking water and sanitation as foundations for human development, health and resilience, with particular attention to communities facing persistent inequality. The event was aligned with the United Nations World Water Development Report, water and gender as a prominent agenda.
A recent OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) paper, Anticipating and monitoring water risks for agriculture, reminds us that the challenge is not only having too little water. Agriculture is increasingly confronted with “too much, too little or too polluted” water, while climate change is making the hydrological cycle more variable and less predictable.
For the Mediterranean, this perspective is particularly relevant. Water scarcity and water quality cannot always be treated as separate problems. When water resources are under pressure, pollution further reduces the amount of water that can be safely used. And among the pressures affecting surface water and groundwater, the OECD specifically highlights nutrient and nitrate pollution.
This brings us to an important question for the circular economy:
What if better nutrient management could also become part of better water management?
This is one of the questions at the heart of the MedRESOURCE project.
In Sardinia, the project is working in Arborea, a Nitrate Vulnerable Zone, where agriculture, livestock production, nutrient management and water quality are closely interconnected. Here, nitrogen is recovered from digestate through ammonia stripping and transformed into ammonium sulphate for agricultural use. The aim is not simply to turn a residual stream into a new product.
The real challenge is to understand whether nutrients can be recovered, monitored and returned to agricultural production in a more controlled way, reducing losses to the environment while maintaining their productive value.
In other words, a nutrient that escapes the production cycle may become a pressure on water. A nutrient that is safely recovered and appropriately used may become a resource again.
Across its Mediterranean activities, MedRESOURCE is exploring this relationship between water, nutrients, soils and agriculture, combining technological experimentation with monitoring, knowledge transfer and dialogue with the actors who will ultimately have to use, regulate or assess these solutions.
The OECD makes another point that is especially relevant: information and technology create value only when they become part of real decisions. Farmers, water managers, public authorities and research institutions therefore need to build knowledge together.
Perhaps this is one of the messages to take from World Water Week 2026: water resilience is not only about finding more water.
It is also about protecting its quality, using nutrients better and closing resource cycles without transferring environmental pressures from one part of the system to another.
Anna Pireddu is Communication and Capacity Building manager of CRENoS (University of Cagliari).
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