Raúl Medina, DG IH Cantabria: "we compete at international level in technology transfer and research"
The Institute of Environmental Hydraulics, IH Cantabria, has been dedicated for more than 10 years to R&D&I for sustainable development in inland and coastal water engineering
How was the Fundación Instituto de Hidráulica Medioambiental born?
The institute was born at the University, where there were two research groups that had enormous potential but the structure of the University itself was not sufficient to allow for their development. So a Foundation was created between the University of Cantabria and the Government of Cantabria, the Environmental Hydraulics Institute Foundation, which is the one that allows all this potential to be developed, and from two University groups that were made up of around forty people, there are now one hundred and fifty of us.
Who is or who are the trustees of the Foundation?
We have two trustees, the University of Cantabria and the Government of Cantabria, they come together and tell us that the University is looking for research, training and doctoral theses and the Government is looking for an attractive project to generate both employment and wealth. From this union, the Institute was born and we have the following tasks: to do science, to train people and to generate wealth. We export the science and technology produced in Cantabria.
To what extent is the Arab world important for the Institute's portfolio?
We asked our administrator to tell us how much work we have done in the last five years for the Arab world, and the figure is almost three million euros. Out of a budget of around seven million euros, we are talking about three million euros over five years in the Arab world, which would be around six hundred thousand euros a year on average, the average could be close to 10%.
There are two very strong and important projects that we did, one for Oman that dealt with the tsunami and cyclone warning system, early warning. They have hurricanes like those in the Caribbean and tropical storms coming in from India and sweeping through Oman. They were very concerned about both these "hurricanes" and tsunamis. The problem of tsunamis in Oman is terrible because they are facing Iran, where there are earthquakes. Those earthquakes that are generated in Iran spread and reach Oman as well. So if they don't have an early warning system by the time they want to know about it, it's too late, so we have been working with them for about three years to develop this system.
What are the key projects that have been developed there?
The three emblematic projects that we have developed in the Arab world would be this one in Oman, another one that we developed in Qatar, where we did the whole management plan for the coast of Qatar. It is a beautiful country but it is like a small child that grows disproportionately in a short period of time, so in Qatar they have done "mega" everything, they have done "mega" airports, "mega" ports, etc.
It was initially a disorderly growth, until the government understood that the growth of facilities on the coast had to be ordered. They opened an international tender in which thirty-three bidders presented themselves and we won. We spent three years planning how and where Qatar's coastal development should grow.
The third one I would highlight is that of Egypt, where we were contracted through the PENUT, where we implemented the entire management plan for the northern coast of Egypt, which is a lot of kilometres from the coast on the border with Libya to the Sinai.
So that's what the institute is dedicated to, and from a more emotional perspective, what is the project you would highlight?
And that is what we are dedicated to transferring knowledge from here that is useful elsewhere. The three most important projects are undoubtedly the three I mentioned, the one in Oman, the one in Qatar and the one in Egypt. But the most endearing for me are the ones in Tunisia, we started working in Tunisia about twenty years ago, this was a request made directly by the Tunisian government to the Spanish government, in which they said: "I have problems on the coast, who is more advanced than me? They looked at the Mediterranean and thought of Spain, so they turned to the Spanish government, the Spanish government, foreign affairs, in turn contacted the Directorate General of Coasts (DGC), who called us and we went to Tunisia. And the relationship with Tunisia continues, because one of the things we also do is to bring people from the Arab world to train them here. We have students from Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco who have been trained here and then returned to their countries.
They come here trained as engineers and here, what is the academic fulfilment they are looking for?
They have done their degree in their country and come here to do their doctoral thesis. Our relationship with the Arab world is not only about projects but also about training. We also collaborate with the Women for Africa Foundation, to bring a young student from the African continent and train her here, people have come from Morocco, Algeria, our relationship with the Arab world is continuous.
And with the rest of the world, the institute has a double financing, a public base, but the basis of the financing is the projects, the work and the sales that are carried out around the world, what is the institute's flagship project?
There wouldn't be one, it's the whole of the institute itself. As far as funding is concerned, since last year the government has been giving us a contribution to support us. Research has to be financed, until last year we retained a percentage of the projects I mentioned for research. As the articles or doctoral theses are paid for, they come out of the consultancy projects, this has a logical limitation because the percentage that you can deduct if you have a project, you have the expenses, you have to execute it, how much profit do you have left that you can dedicate to research? In this way, our research was limited by this ceiling or threshold of funding that we could obtain from the projects, so we went to the Government of Cantabria and said that if we wanted to make a qualitative leap, if we wanted to increase the number of people working here and generate wealth, we had to plant seed money that would allow us to do so. Likewise, they thought it was a good idea and since last year we have had a basal funding of one million euros and apart from that we have our budget of seven, in other words, the basal funding represents around 15% of the Institute's budget.
What does the Institute do?
The Institute, as I say, is dedicated to water. From when it rains, it goes down the river, then into an estuary and out to the sea and everything that water carries, sediments, nutrients, pollution, oil spills, as well as everything that is around water, management of a river basin, a bridge, a dam, a beach, a port. We have been in existence for twelve years and we have carried out more than twelve hundred projects and worked in sixty-six different countries. So trying to say which of these more than 1,200 projects is the most... in the end, they are like children, all of them, and each one has its own special quality. At the end of the day, there are twelve hundred problems that someone had, there is no small problem, there are twelve hundred cases in which a company, an individual or an administration had a problem to solve and came to us to solve it, so we always treat them with the same commitment and dedication.
I have been in some conflicts in the Gulf, the Balkans, etc., and the experts always told us that beyond the third world wars we are experiencing with cyber-attacks, financing wars or with the issue of viruses, it will be water, an elementary good for human subsistence, that could produce a third conventional world war.
Water is necessary for life, and we have a problem whether it is lacking, surplus or dirty, we make so much use of water, it is so necessary that it is very difficult not to have problems with water, in some places because it is lacking so we must see how to regulate and how to economise and how to make an economy of water, and in other places because it is surplus and we have floods and problems both in industries and with the population living in those places, human damage with people dying and everywhere there is a problem of sanitation, of dirty water.
Are political leaders sufficiently aware of the need for good water management, for everyone, not just for a particular interest at a particular time for some or for others?
I would say yes.
The Paris summit could be a point of reference.
Note that water, within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), of the seventeen that exist, in one way or another, is still in the middle. Whether for marine ecosystems or drinking water, in one way or another water is involved in almost half of the SDGs. Water is always a differential element and leaders are well aware of this problem. You have to take into account the amount of elements and territory that water involves. As I explained before, the institute is dedicated from when it rains, it goes down the mountainside, it continues down the plain, it reaches the sea, it goes to the coast, it goes offshore. And we have marine renewable energies in offshore, we have problems on the coast, we have ports, we have oil spills, water is in everything.
For those who don't know, what is "offshore"?
Well, "offshore" is an anglicism that literally means offshore. So our work does not end when the river water reaches the shore, our work within the institute does not end at the interface line between land and water, but continues with the water into the open sea, let's translate "offshore" as open sea.
What happens in the open sea, first of all, is a great unknown and now we are starting to talk about the blue economy, an economy that involves a whole set of potentialities that we have in the sea. Instead of looking only at the land, we have to look at the sea and see the range of possibilities that are open to us. One of them is the whole issue of marine renewable energies, the most immediate being wind turbines. When we go out to sea, offshore the wind is very uniform and constant, the energy production is much higher. There are a series of technological challenges to which the institute is dedicated, here we have twelve patents and most of them are related to open sea issues, with elements of structures and infrastructures dedicated to renewable energies.
Both in health and in research, in this case we are talking about research, we need to be aware that the money spent in these fields is an investment. Society often wonders, "How much does this cost? If we don't do research, if we don't have innovation and new solutions, we will have many more problems and they will be more costly.
No doubt about it. I also try to put myself in the shoes of the politician who has to manage resources that are also limited and that politician, that manager has to make difficult decisions. There are many things that are necessary, research is necessary, but dependency issues are necessary, there are many issues that need attention, and research is certainly one of them. Research is an investment whether we look at it from an economic or a social perspective. The institute is an example of this.
Moreover, you are branding Spain, it may be an intangible, but it has enormous value. Without being Rafa Nadal, Fernando Alonso or Pau Gasol, you give value to the Spain brand.
We are simply doing our bit.
That's what I'm talking about, the need we have in Spain to value research and centres like this one.
Yes, of course. In terms of research, we have been ranked sixth and seventh in the world in the Shanghai ranking. Moreover, in terms of research, one hundred and fifty is miniscule compared to large research centres. And in terms of consultancy and transfer to society, it is comforting when you go somewhere far away from Cantabria and they tell us that they know us.
What responsibility do we in the media have to move away from the gravy train and report on the issues that are really interesting and create wealth?
The easy answer would be that, of course research has to be in the limelight, and I have to say that, but it also has to be weighed up. People in the media have to sell a newspaper, they have to sell a story, and there are certain stories that sell better than others.
I do believe that the media should make an effort and try to always have a certain percentage of news in the stock market dedicated to good news and in particular to news such as an institute that came out of nowhere, is an international benchmark, is selling the Spanish brand and is exporting from here. I understand the dilemma facing the media, they have to survive and the only thing I would ask of them is that they let people know that we exist and that we are here.
Of all the bad things that have happened and continue to happen to us, what has the pandemic taught you? What lessons have you learned at school?
The first lesson is that you can provide a service without travelling so much. Telecommunication systems make it possible to have conferences. I won't say that they are a complete substitute for a face-to-face conference. But we have learned that you can have a meeting thousands of miles away and it works perfectly. Another thing we have learnt with the pandemic would be the issue of teleworking, it is an element that has not been learnt well enough yet, people have been thrown into the situation where they have to go home to work and maybe they don't have the right facilities there. We have been thrown into a new world, but there will be things in this world that will endure. I agree with Bill Gates that two-thirds of the journeys will not be repeated. Although I think you still need a face-to-face, especially for a first meeting, the first contact, to see the face, to see the gestures, to have a context, the chemistry, that is necessary.
What are the institute's prospects for overcoming the crisis, if it has been directly affected by the crisis?
Before the pandemic came to Europe, the institute, seeing what was happening in China and Iran, where it was also noticed quite early, made a contingency plan. The contingency plan was to try to see what could happen to us and one of the things that is happening and will continue to happen and that we already foresaw is a lack of proposals. We go to public calls for proposals launched by the World Bank or the Technical Development Bank or the Caribbean Development Bank, normally with multilateral bodies, as a World Bank call for proposals arises, they report a problem such as a catastrophe created by a hurricane in a region and they announce that they are going to issue a call for proposals to help that region, but now you cannot travel to see the scope of the problem, because of the pandemic. So that call, which would normally go out in two months' time, now doesn't go out because you can't travel and measure the impact. Therefore, there is a notable decrease in the number of calls for proposals and we have made a great effort to be attentive to the calls for proposals in order to have a portfolio for 2021. At the moment we have 85% of the 2021 portfolio covered. This gives us guarantees that next year we will have no problems.
Are you thinking about "Las Catedrales" beach? We recently witnessed the collapse of one of its arches.
I am thinking of the whole coast because there are very serious problems all along the coast, on the Cantabrian Sea or the Mediterranean coast in Murcia. Perhaps in the north of Spain, as the climatic conditions are less favourable because there has been a lot of tourism, we perceive it less, but the erosion problems that exist in certain parts of the Mediterranean coast for Spain are very relevant. Spain has more than 10% of its GDP that comes from tourism that comes to the coast. At the moment, due to the pandemic, it has become clear that sectors such as the hotel and catering industry and tourism are the ones that have suffered most from the Covid-19 crisis.
When a technician of your category talks about the problems there are with water and erosion I see a problem of a certain dysfunction between reality and what society detects, either because there are people like Trump who deny the existence of climate change and this makes people confused and naively believe it and the reality that people who are technically well informed take for granted. If that doesn't trickle down to society and society pushes for this not to happen, society will only push back later when the buildings that are attached to the coast fall down because they are too close together and the area has eroded.
It is a difficult balance. On the one hand, as a technician you see what is happening and you know what it entails, and the next step would be the obligation of scientists and the media to communicate that to society. The most complicated element here is how to convey this in the right way, because if you are too catastrophic, society becomes immune and thinks that why worry about something that has no solution, we have to find the right balance between informing and "worrying", in the good sense of the word, and not going overboard and not sending this type of catastrophic messages. We scientists and the media have an obligation to communicate and transmit without being too catastrophic so as not to achieve the opposite effect. And we would return to the issue of managers: how much money does Spain spend on repairing and restoring its coasts and rivers? Well, a tiny amount compared to the return we get from it. The budget that the Directorate General for the Coast and the Sea has is tiny compared to this, the money that is spent on this issue is tremendously little.
Has the institute been able or has it been allowed to present any project for the European Union recovery fund?
We have a very close collaboration with the National Government and with the Government of Cantabria and we have been asked, and we have collaborated. Obviously the projects are projects of the Spanish Government or the Government of Cantabria, but in the development of these projects we have been asked for our opinion, we have been asked for inputs and many of them have been incorporated into the projects presented from Cantabria.
It is an important source of funding...
This is not the way it is planned. These projects are not planned for the institute as a means of financing, we are trying to give back to society, to try to give back to the Government of Cantabria and the Government of Spain the trust they have placed in us. The projects that are presented from Cantabria we have given our inputs but that is not invested in our institute. We have tried to incorporate our knowledge into the projects presented by Cantabria for the conservation of riverbeds, coastal conservation, etc.
What would you say to someone who is in Malaga or the Canary Islands about the institute?
When people come here I always end up saying the same thing, every time the word water comes up think of the institute. Every time you have a problem related to water, think of the institute. That's our goal, to cover the whole water cycle and the whole water use, that has a terrible power because we can work all over the world.
As an experience, until you get to a place like Sarajevo, and you are three or four days without water, you don't realise that at home you go to the tap, turn it on and water comes out, and if you turn it, it comes out hot. Maybe we should introduce knowledge of all this in schools.
It is terrible. For the Spanish Cooperation Agency for AECID we did a series of courses within the orange blossom programme for all the countries of Africa, and we brought technicians from different countries, so of course people came from the Gaza Strip, and you listened to them talk about their problems and your soul really fell to your feet. That's when you realise the problems that exist behind the water. Treatment plant, we have been dumping directly into the sea for years and the pollution... but I have to live, I have to eat, it's tremendous.
Is there anything about the institute that you would like to highlight that perhaps we haven't gone into in depth.
Apart from what we have said, I would like to point out the hallmarks of the institute. There are one hundred and fifty people here, forty percent of whom are engineers (civil, telecommunications, industrial), another forty percent are environmentalists, and the remaining twenty percent are divided between lawyers, economists, geographers, etc. This multidisciplinary character is what allows us to approach water problems from different facets, i.e. when we go to a call for negotiations with the World Bank they call us because we not only give them the engineering solution, but we also provide the urban planning solution, the social solution, the environmental solution.
The fact of being able to bring together the different facets of water is what has allowed us to grow and compete internationally, providing global solutions.
I said earlier that we are dedicated to three things: research, training and technology transfer, but I would like to highlight the next leap behind that, which is from science to geopolitics. This means that our mission is fundamentally not only to solve the day-to-day problem of the coast or the river but to transfer this knowledge to the managers so that they can transform it into laws, rules, regulations, in other words, to enable the manager to develop the appropriate regulations based on science.
In Spain, for example, we are working with the Directorate General for the sustainability of the coast and the sea, on the issue of coastal management strategies, we are working with them on various management strategies, something we have already done in Qatar and other countries, it is about being with the managers to give them the correct information and then they can take the decision that needs to be taken, but with the appropriate data.
Finally, is the level of the institute in terms of training, research and the quality of its researchers comparable to any other institute in the world? To use a footballing simile, we are playing in the Champions League.
We are in the Champions League, we started working at regional level, never better said here in Cantabria, then we moved on to national level and for some time now we have been playing in the Champions League. For example, earlier I mentioned the case of the Qatar project and they don't mess around there. They put out the international cole and to judge the projects they hired a team of twelve people to evaluate the proposals and in the end we were left with 9 proposals and we were invited to go to Doha to defend the proposal. The day I went to defend ours in front of me there was a team of English people, with Australians, etc., and that's when I realised that we were in the Champions League. And we are competing on an equal footing both in terms of technology transfer and research; there is nothing they can do that we can't do.
Congratulations, really, this type of institute is a source of pride, and what's more, little is known about it, I would like to take my own interests to heart and it cannot be that this is not communicated.
It sells little, that's the problem. But we return to the previous point, there should be a percentage of positive news or recognition, that people know that places like this exist, I think it is necessary.