SMART is a multilateral and interdisciplinary research project of 25 partners from universities, research centers, water authorities, decision-relevant institutions, external experts as well as industry partners in Germany, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan. The SMART project was based on the German-Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian (GIJP) project which was also funded by the BMBF from 1997 – 2004 and concentrated on a regional hydrological, hydrogeological, and hydrochemical database as well as on exemplary detailed studies along a section from Jerusalem to Amman crossing the Jordan rift valley.

In SMART II, which was initiated in 2010, the overall goal was to develop an IWRM concept for the Lower Jordan Valley to ensure an optimized and sustainable use of all water resources in the region. Ideally, the developed, applied, and validated concepts were to be transferable to other regions suffering from natural and/or man-made water scarcity. Besides conventional water resources, unconventional water resources are taken into account, such as treated wastewater, temporally stored surface water, and desalinated brackish groundwater. To ensure a sustainable exploitation and use of the results gained through the investigations, involvement of decision-making stakeholders was one of the basic requirement in planning the project.

Due to its size and the wide scope of research activities, SMART was divided into sub-projects and work packages (WP) addressing IWRM-relevant issues. The IWRM character of SMART is reflected by the structure of the project showing the work packages and their interdependencies. (Wolf & Hötzl 2011, Klinger et al. 2014, Klinger et al. 2015)