Drought is a recurring problem with serious economic, social and environmental cost to the FCE area. The agri-food sector employs over 228,000 people in the EN and has a turn-over of €36bn in the FR FCE. It is estimated that 10%-20% of this is at risk from drought. In EN the 2011/12 drought resulted in supply restrictions to 20m customers, emergency measures to refill reservoirs & around €325m in revenue reductions, lost profit & other costs. Since 2011, there have been droughts in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Much of the regions natural capital is supported by water and increasingly vulnerable to drought. Channel Climate Change (CC) projections suggest 10-40% reductions in summer rainfall and increased drought frequency and intensity (Ref 1&2). There is an urgent need for cross border collaboration to improve the management of water resources and increase CC resilience. WfT addresses common challenges on smart growth (2), sustainable growth (5 & 6), and project SO 1.1 (increase the delivery and uptake of innovative products, processes, systems and services in shared smart specialisation sectors). WfT will deliver innovative participatory planning processes and design and implement new management systems to increase CC resilience in water stressed catchments in East Anglia (EN), Bretagne and Hauts-de-France (FR). National and cross-border activities will ensure the transfer of results to address the following specific challenges:Unsustainable abstraction already affects EN catchments and is an emerging issue in FR. Current management systems do not enable multi-sector water resource planning and therefore deliver single objective sub-optimal outcomes.Abstraction management systems are not flexible enough to cope with prolonged periods of dry weather and water shortages – both will increase as water demand rises and supply reduces from growth and CC.WfT will address these challenges by co-designing and implementing new management tools and systems that utilise innovative and smart technologies to deliver multi-objective and cost-effective outcomes. Including new data collection methods, hydro-economic models and new software to improve water allocation and early warning of water scarcity. Reports (Ref 2 & 6) suggest a crude economic estimate of the potential economic benefits in EN as ~€10m per catchment per year.