The Water Institute is pleased to announce that it is an official partner in a new project which has received funding for five years. The European Union’s PRORISK project to train professionals in integrated environmental risk assessment, linked to ecosystems and ecosystem services, received funding for the coming five years and had its virtual kick-off meeting this April.
PRORISK is a European Training Network comprised of 18 universities, research institutions, enterprises, and partner organizations from nine European countries and Canada, the Water Institute being the only non-European member. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant, PRORISK brings together a unique network of scientists that have strong interdisciplinary backgrounds in chemistry, biology, environmental, and social sciences. Every partner represents cutting-edge scientific expertise in a specific field required for driving beyond the state-of-the-art integrated risk assessment approaches.
"The PRORISK network includes world-leading scientific risk assessment competencies that together offer a unique and innovative training platform for a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists and professionals. The Water Institute is proud and honoured to contribute to this new initiative and host some of the Early Stage Researchers in Waterloo in the near future.” Roy Brouwer, Water Institute executive director.
The vision of PRORISK is to provide unique value by creating a novel platform for training a network of Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of advanced Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA). ERA is rapidly changing from relying on simplified descriptive laboratory tests to incorporating ecological and socio-economic process information. This revolutionizes the risk assessment, making it increasingly interdisciplinary, realistic and relevant. ESRs in PRORISK will gain the abilities required to navigate the risk assessment paradigm shift and will work as future experts at the interface of sustainable protection of ecosystems, ecosystem health and ecosystem services. These young researchers will be able to tackle increasingly complex contexts involving trade-offs between environmental and societal risks and benefits, and critically evaluate the robustness of risk predictions and risk mitigation strategies.
Read more about the PRORISK project here.