Water4All 2025 Joint Transnational Call - Water and Health
Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS)
Call topics:
Research and innovation proposals submitted under the Water4All 2025 Joint Transnational Call are required to address at least one of the following topics:
Topic 1: Waterborne contaminants & health risks: occurrence, behaviour, interactions and vulnerability:
1.1 Environmental Occurrence and Behaviour of Waterborne Contaminants in Health Context
1.2 Pathogens and Disease Transmission
Topic 2: Innovative tools and technologies for Water quality and exposure monitoring:
2.1 Advanced Water Monitoring Technologies for Health Protection and Risk Management
2.2 Novel Approaches for Health Risk and Exposure Assessment
Topic 3: Water treatment and exposure mitigation:
3.1 Resilient and Equitable Water Treatment Technologies for Health Protection
3.2 Contaminant Mitigation and Exposure Prevention for Human and Environmental Health
Topic 4: Governance, socio-economic innovation, and policy integration for water and health.
Proposals should also consider the following cross-cutting aspects where relevant:
● Governance and policy: Addressing regulatory challenges, policy frameworks (such as the EU Drinking Water Directive, the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive and the Water Reuse Regulation) and public health guidelines for water safety.
● Climate change impacts: Evaluating how climate variability affects water contamination and treatment efficiency in relation to health risks.
● Socio-economic and behavioural aspects: Investigating public perceptions, behavioural changes, and stakeholder engagement in water quality management (aligned with SRIA Theme 7.1 on citizen and stakeholder engagement).
● Digital and AI-driven tools: Promoting the development and integration of methodologies and tools based on digital monitoring, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance water quality assessment and treatment.
● Innovation adoption and implementation: Strategies to facilitate the real-world deployment of new water treatment and monitoring solutions (linked to SRIA Theme 7.3).
Details on these topics are given in the call text.
Financement
Each partner is funded separately by the national/regional funding organisation they are applying to. They must fulfil the conditions of their funding organisation.
The maximum amount of requested funding per project is 300.000 EUR for a total period of thee years. If the project involves the recruitment of a PhD student, the project duration of the F.R.S.-FNRS sub-project could be up to four years.
Eligible costs items
Personnel costs: 80,000€ EUR per year on average for the duration of the project. The usual duration of ERA-NET research programmes is three years. However, when the project involves a PhD student, the principal investigator can apply for an additional one year funding in order to complete the four years PhD programme. Since this programme is co-funded by the European Commission, this final year should not be included in the budget submitted to this call.
Equipment: can be eligible up to 20% of the total budget of the project
Running costs: travel expenses; organisation of small scientific events in Belgium; consumables and the following support costs: consumables Publication Designing (conception d’ouvrage) Dictionary Production (réalisation de dictionnaire) Purchase of Books Encoding Software Access Rights Congress Registration Fees Purchase of Computer Scanning Travel costs Visa costs Open Access publication of an article up until 500 euros (see F.R.S-FNRS Open Access policy).
“Overhead” is not an eligible cost for FNRS. If the project is selected for funding, these costs will be subject to a separate agreement between the institution of the beneficiary and the F.R.S.-FNRS.
Pour postuler
Transnational level
The application process consists of two consecutive steps.
The submission of a pre-proposal in Step 1 is mandatory. It is not possible to enter the application procedure at a later stage.
STEP 1 The Consortium Coordinator must submit a pre-proposal on behalf of the consortium, providing key data on the proposed project. The Consortium Coordinators fulfilling the condition of eligibility of the modality of ECR (see section 3.1.2) are invited to mark it in the submission tool. Their pre-proposals are submitted as part of the ECR modality. The deadline for the submission of the pre-proposal is 13/11/2025, 15h00 CET.
STEP 2 The Consortium Coordinator must submit a full proposal on behalf of the consortium. The deadline for full proposal submission is 13/04/2026, 15h00 CEST. Deadline to be confirmed after Step 1.
National/regional level
Applicants must provide basic administrative data by submitting an administrative application on e-space within 5 working days after the general deadline of the call to be eligible. Please select the “PINT-MULTI” funding instrument when creating the administrative application.
Requis d'admission
Eligibility of the consortia
To be eligible, research consortia must:
- Each consortium must be composed of a minimum of three eligible partners that request funding from participating Funding Partner Organisations from three different countries.
- In addition to the abovementioned condition, the projects must involve at least two independent legal entities from two different EU Member States or Horizon Europe associated countries as recipients of the financial support.
Applications will be submitted by the coordinator. Each consortium participant will be funded by the Funding Organisation from their country/region participating in the JTC 2025. Participants are therefore subject to eligibility criteria of national/regional funding organisations.
See call document for more details.
Regional eligibility criteria
Eligibility for belgian partners (F.R.S. - FNRS):
Applicants requesting funding from F.R.S. FNRS must comply with the following rules.
The applicant must be affiliated to a university from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB).
At the closure of the call, the applicant should also:
- Be a permanent researcher of F.R.S-FNRS (Chercheur qualifié, maître de recherches ou Directeur de recherche) or;
- Hold a tenure track position (or an assimilated position including pending tenure track) with a research institution from the FWB
After the submission of applications, the F.R.S.-FNRS and the research institutions are required to verify the eligibility of the candidates. The F.R.S.-FNRS reserves the right to refuse those whose eligibility criteria would not comply with the Regulation. In order the check the compliance with these eligibility criteria, please contact your contact person at ULB-TTO (see details below). The complete F.R.S-FNRS rules for international research projects is available at the following link: https://www.frs-fnrs.be/docs/Reglement-et-documents/International/FRS-FNRS_PINT-Multi.pdf
Zones géographiques
Les zones géographiques n'ont pas encore été spécifiées.