FOR A BETTER ADAPTATION OF THERMAL TERRITORIES TOWARD CLIMATE CHANGE - ThermEcoWat Project

The wealth of spa territories depends directly on their main resource: mineral and thermal groundwater. Their use has developed from Antiquity to the present day, through various applications, mainly medical and energy-related, enabling the growth of highly attractive local sectors. However, climate change is threatening their sustainability, impacting thermal resources and exploitation models. In the Interreg Southwest Europe region (SUDOE), this occurs by natural triggers such as a rainfall redistribution coupled to a long-term downward trend in its quantity, which may cause a deterioration in the current quality and quantity of water from thermal water points, and governance issues.

To minimize the impacts of climate change at the territorial level and increase their resilience, only an adaptation plan based on a clear strategy can be employed. However, the decisional processes needed to develop such a plan may generate conflicts among the relevant stakeholders and decision makers. To face these difficulties, the ThermEcoWat Project proposes a workflow and a methodology for the definition of adaptation strategies that include environmental, socio-economic, and regulatory aspects, based on participative approach structured around thematic workshops and a decision-aiding tool. This tool must be capable of managing the complexity of data and information requested for short-, medium-, and long-term strategies.

A consortium of geoscientists, city managers and entrepreneurs representing three thermal towns (Chaudes-Aigues - FR, Caldes de Montbui - ESP, and São Pedro do Sul - PT) are working together to (1) release a diagnostic of the current functioning of each pilot case and their link with thermal resource, (2) understand the current and futures constraints applied to the use of the resource, and (3) propose sustainable solutions that  all relevant stakeholders agree on. These objectives need relevant amount of heterogeneous types of data, organized in a multidisciplinary knowledge base, which is the fundament of the decision-aiding tool. This tool, currently under development, leverages semantic data management technologies to enable an innovative approach to transdisciplinary data collection and a powerful knowledge extraction capability through inference. 

This methodology is expected to be replicable across all European thermal sites in order to improve the durability of investments and build the essential prerequisite for adaptation to climate change.