On 7-8 May 2026, CIRQUA’s stakeholder workshop at Istanbul University brought around 50 participants from Turkish ministries, municipalities and regional water utilities into working sessions on wastewater treatment and water reuse.
CIRQUA held a two-day stakeholder workshop on 7-8 May 2026 at the Faculty of Aquatic Sciences, Istanbul University. The event gathered around 50 participants from governmental institutions, municipalities, water authorities and academia to discuss sustainable solutions for wastewater treatment and water reuse in the Mediterranean.
The programme opened with remarks from project partner Prof. Dr. Meriç Albay (Istanbul University). The CIRQUA Project Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Spyridon Ntougias (Democritus University of Thrace), then presented the project’s objectives, technical approach and expected impacts. Prof. Dr. Reyhan Akçaalan (Istanbul University) followed with the latest outputs and ongoing developments from the work packages. Regional evaluations and interactive discussions closed the first day, focused on local challenges, implementation opportunities and sustainable water management.
Institutions at the table. Participants included representatives from the General Directorate of Environmental Management (Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change), the General Directorate of Water Management (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry), Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality and Sarıyer Municipality. The regional water and sewerage utilities İSKİ (Istanbul), TESKİ(Tekirdağ) and SASKİ (Sakarya) were also represented. Their active participation made it possible to run substantive regional evaluations and to identify collaboration opportunities for wastewater management and water reuse in practice.
Awareness activity on wastewater reuse with students aged 10-12, organised at SAGEM.
Day two: museum visit and outreach to younger generations. Participants visited the Istanbul Water Civilizations Museum. In parallel, an educational and interactive session on wastewater reuse was organised at SAGEM for students aged 10-12, aimed at raising awareness of sustainable water management and circular water practices among the next generation of Mediterranean water users.
Why this matters for CIRQUA. The Istanbul workshop sits inside CIRQUA’s WP5 stakeholder engagement track. Nature-based solutions for water reuse only scale when ministries, municipalities and utilities can see the technology in context and bring their own regulatory and operational constraints into the design conversation. Getting İSKİ, TESKİ and SASKİ, three of the larger Turkish water and sewerage administrations, into the same room as the consortium is a concrete step toward that.
The CIRQUA consortium thanks Prof. Akçaalan, Prof. Albay and the Istanbul University team for hosting, and every institution that joined the discussion.
CIRQUA is a 36-month PRIMA project (Apr 2024 – Mar 2027) funded under Horizon Europe with €4.09 million. The consortium gathers 13 partners from 10 countries across 3 continents, working on upgraded constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment and water reuse in Mediterranean rural areas. More: cirqua-water.eu.
