The Coordination Action ADU-RES will achieve two main objectives: 1) Further development of integrated plant designs for mature and cost efficient autonomous desalination units (ADUs) which are based on renewable energy sources (RES) 2) Formulation of poli tical strategies for boosting ADU-RES implementation within the existing political and legislative frameworks in the Mediterranean 1) R&D units of autonomous desalination units with a capacity below 50 m3 per day which are based on RES are operating su ccessfully under the supervision of water and research institutes. Still, commercial applications remain rare. Now is the time to strengthen and unite research work for the design of robust and cost-effective desalination plants that operate autonomously on RES. Remaining S&T challenges are: Radical cost reduction Advanced management and control system Improved long-term reliability Environmentally sound set-ups 2) Large scale implementation of RES based ADUs require favourable legislative and institut ional framework conditions. The action will examine the relevant legislation in EU, AS and MPC, and elaborate a policy initiative for boosting RES based ADUs. Concrete suggestions for how to improve existing EU legislation, such as the EU Water Framework D irective, will be formulated. ADU-RES will make extensive use of the knowledge from previous and on-going R&D actions and bases its dissemination and exploitation plan on the existing networks and communication platforms. The ADU-RES consortium unites the main research players from EU and selected partners from seven MPC. This will mobilise the critical mass necessary to finally bridge the gap between the successful R&D work of the last decade and concrete installations for RES based desalination pl ants in arid Mediterranean regions. This ambitious task is supported by a well designed exploitation and dissemination plan which is based on a comprehensive demand analysis of water consumers.