The first Veneto Water Safety Plan was presented on June 21 at the prestigious Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, full of attendants. The Water Safety Plans (WSPs) are an innovative tool to proactively guarantee the salubrity of the water supplied by the aqueduct complex to the consumers, through a structured approach of evaluation and preventive management of all the current risks along the entire drinking-water supply system (from water supply sources, to the treatment facility, up to the distribution system).

This is an epochal cultural change for the guarantee system of drinkingwater safety, which requires a strong presence of institutions in order to be supported and directed. The LIFE PHOENIX project acts synergistically with this process, as highlighted in its presentation by Francesca Russo, Director of the Regional Prevention, Food Safety & Veterinary Department of the Veneto Region. As part of this project, a data warehouse is being developed that will contain, among other things, information on potential polluting sources, drinking-water supply chain (and its catchment area) and water quality data.

Conceived as a sort of "virtual container", the data warehouse of the LIFE PHOENIX Project will make effectively interact with each other the data already available (even if currently in a fragmented way) coming from the various institutions involved, and will be integrated by a forecasting model able to estimate the movement of contaminants inside the groundwater. This tool is extremely useful for the Managing Authorities and the Control Units in order to enable a complete risk assessment of the entire drinking-water supply chain.

The event of June 21, an important moment of sharing, was organized by Viveracqua (Managing Authorities consortium of the Integrated Water Services of the Veneto region) in collaboration with the Veneto Region and with the participation of the Italy's Higher Institute of Health, the ULSS Units involved, ARPAV and the Brenta Basin Council. All the participating institutions (primarily the Managing Authorities, but also ARPAV and ULSS units) will be involved from now on in the preparation of the WSPs of all the other aqueduct networks of the regional territory. LIFE PHOENIX Project brochures have been distributed to over one hundred participants at the event.

Recommended by the World Health Organization, the WSP tool has been introduced into European legislation with Directive (EU) 2015/1787, implemented in Italy by Decree of the Minister of Health of 14 June 2017. The adoption of WSPs is mandatory by 2025 in the whole national
territory. The Veneto Region, struck by the PFAS emergency in 2013, was one of the first Italian regions to have started, in collaboration with the Italy's Higher Institute of Health, the test of this new approach, through the preparation of the WSP for the Lonigo aqueduct complex, which serves over 100,000 inhabitants in 26 municipalities inside the provinces of Vicenza, Verona and Padua.