In the Spanish ECHO pilot, Cetaqua is working on two risks that place very different demands on water services and emergency teams. Drought develops over months and requires close monitoring of how conditions change across a territory, whereas flooding can escalate within hours. Our work addresses both through predictive drought maps and an early-warning approach for flooding in Estepona.
Cetaqua is a water technology centre focused on applying research to the practical challenges of managing the water cycle. We work with public authorities, universities, research centres and companies. This experience is relevant in ECHO because the information produced by the project needs to be understood and used by organisations with different responsibilities.
The Spanish pilot takes place in the municipality of Estepona and involves Estepona City Council, emergency services, critical infrastructure operators and other local and regional stakeholders. Its focus on floods and droughts reflects two pressures already familiar to the territory, but the project does not treat them as isolated water problems. Both can affect mobility, communications, essential services and the continuity of local operations.
For drought, Cetaqua has developed a method for producing predictive maps that show how conditions may evolve across the area. We are now working towards a more repeatable process for updating and sharing those maps. They are intended to help water managers follow the development of a drought and identify where pressure may be increasing. They provide evidence to support their work, but they do not replace the operational criteria used to decide which measures should be taken.
Our work on flooding is centred on an early-warning tool for Estepona. We have defined its initial concept and carried out field visits to assess where local measurements could add useful information. The next stages include installing the proposed sensors, integrating their observations with the other available data and developing the code needed to process that information. As these tasks are still under way, the tool should not yet be understood as an operational warning service.
Technical development is only one part of our role. Cetaqua also contributes to workshops with authorities, infrastructure operators, essential service providers and emergency teams. These sessions help to identify who needs the information, how it currently moves between organisations and where gaps appear during a crisis. They also give us a way to check whether a map or alert is clear enough to be useful outside the team that produced it.
The next step is to test the tools with the organisations involved in the pilot and adjust them to their day-to-day needs. For Cetaqua, the value of this work lies in connecting water data with the people responsible for acting on it, while being clear about what the tools can show and where professional judgement is still required. The experience in Málaga will also help us assess which parts of the approach could be adapted to other territories facing similar risks.
