Closing Remarks After Four Years of Transforming Lagoon Management
After starting in 2020 under the Horizon 2020 program, SMARTLAGOON has now reached its conclusion. Over four years of intense and dedicated work, the project has pushed the boundaries of innovation to address the challenges facing the Mar Menor lagoon.
The greatest achievement of SMARTLAGOON has been the development of a digital twin of the Mar Menor, a groundbreaking virtual model that integrates geospatial, climatic, and social data. This digital twin allows stakeholders to simulate and predict environmental scenarios, providing invaluable insights for decision-making and sustainable management. This achievement reflects the project’s core mission: combining technology, science, and community engagement to predict socio-environmental evolution and protect highly anthropized coastal lagoons.
Being the last month of the project, in December we focused our efforts on handing our knowledge back to stakeholders and citizens. The following is a brief summary of the main events that took place last month.
Meeting with the National Government
On December 3, we had a meeting with the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge of the National Government (MITECO), at the Oficina Técnica del Mar Menor), in Murcia. There, we presented the outcomes of SMARTLAGOON to director Inmaculada Ramírez Santigosa, and to the Head of the Coastal Demarcation of MITECO, Daniel Caballero.
Workshop with stakeholders
On December 3, we held a final stakeholder meeting with participants from agriculture, tourism, fisheries, and NGOs who had been involved in workshops to co-develop the system dynamics socio-ecological model for Mar Menor. During this session, stakeholders were presented with the final user interface and interacted with the model, testing various long-term scenarios for sustainable management of Mar Menor.
Meeting with the Regional Government
On December 4, we welcomed Juan María Vázquez, Regional Minister for the Environment, Universities, Research and the Mar Menor, and Antonio Caballero, General Director for Universities and Research, at the UCAM HiTech high technology incubator, where we showed a demo of our completed digital twin.
Meeting at the European Parliament
On December 10, a delegation of our team went to Brussels for a meeting with Spanish MEP Maravillas Abadia. During the session, we presented the project’s key outcomes and discussed how the tools and insights generated over the past four years could contribute to more effective management and protection of the Mar Menor and other coastal lagoons.
The road ahead
As SMARTLAGOON closes its final chapter, the tools, technology, and knowledge we developed will ensure its legacy continues to benefit the Mar Menor and beyond. All resources created during the project – including the digital twin – will be handed over to public administrations to guarantee their ongoing use and effectiveness in managing the lagoon. With this transfer, SMARTLAGOON aims to empower governments and stakeholders to address the Mar Menor’s complex challenges while also providing a model for managing other coastal lagoons across Europe. This handover marks not just the end of a project but the beginning of a new era of sustainable and data-driven environmental management.
Although SMARTLAGOON has concluded, its impact will resonate for years to come. We leave confident in the knowledge that the tools we have developed will continue to support the preservation and stewardship of the Mar Menor, ensuring its beauty and ecological richness for generations to come.