PRIMA, the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area, is a 10-year initiative (2018-28), funded by the EU and 20 member countries to create collaborative solutions to water management, farming systems and food value chains in the region.

The Mediterranean region has suffered with the toxic combination of increasing water scarcity, decreasing crop yields and more demand for resources than ever. Over 180 million people in the Mediterranean region are considered ‘water poor’, meaning they cannot maintain a sustainable flow of clean water for essential activities like cultivating crops. In her workshop on Day One of Tropentag 2026, Dr Ioanna Antoniades expressed that these problems remain not for a lack of promising solutions, but lack of integration of these across projects, sectors and nations that is hindering progress. PRIMA was born from a need to address the multidimensional nature of the ecological problems faced in the region by leaving fragmented approaches in the past.

The Partnership is funded through financing from the 20 PRIMA Participating States (€274 million) and a €220 million contribution from the EU through its research and innovation funding programme, Horizon 2020. Since its initiation, it has pioneered countless projects to help preserve the Mediterranean region, including:

• MEDIBEES is a project that monitors the resilience of Mediterranean honeybees in the face of exponential climatic change. Over 80% of the region’s flowering plants rely on pollination, so safeguarding the population is crucial to ensuring continued ecological abundance. One of the primary objectives of MEDIBEES is to genetically map the Apis mellifera subspecies to determine which of their genetic traits are responsible for their adaptation to Mediterranean environments
• SUPROMED, the Sustainable Production in Water Limited Environments of Mediterranean Agro-ecosystems, and is a research and innovation (R&I) project funded by PRIMA which aims to improve the environmental and economic sustainability of Mediterranean farms by promoting more efficient management of water resources. Made up of a partnernship of ten organisations from Spain, France, Greece, Lebanon and Tunisia, SUPROMED will achieve this by providing an online platform designed to advise farmers on how to increase income, reduce water usage and mitigate their impacts on the environment.

These initiatives are just two examples of the critical work PRIMA is undertaking to preserve the precious resources of the Mediterranean for generations to come. With just two years left of PRIMA’s mission, the success of the Partnership will become apparent in the coming years.