Widening Countries (WCs) such as Türkiye, Poland, Greece, Malta, North Macedonia are falling behind in the rapidly evolving Alternative Proteins (APros) sector, which is crucial for addressing global food security and climate change. Closing the skills gap in these regions is essential for ensuring competitiveness and driving sustainable food innovation. The APRISE project focuses on enhancing the capacities of diverse talents in these WCs, providing advanced training and promoting collaboration to strengthen the APros sector. By uniting 18 partners from academia, industry, and non-profit sectors, APRISE delivers a comprehensive approach to talent development. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary knowledge transfer, including technical training in APros production, sustainable practices, and consumer science, as well as professional skills such as policy advocacy, project management, and entrepreneurship. Through secondments and structured training programs, APRISE equips talents to address sector-specific challenges and contribute to sustainable growth. Additionally, APRISE offers a Return Plan to support reintegration into home institutions, ensuring that the skills and knowledge gained are applied to long-term career development. The project’s efforts will significantly increase the capacity of talents across WCs, enabling them to play key roles in the future of the APros sector and ensuring lasting impact in both research and innovation ecosystems.

The continuous increase of the scope and the scale of the anthropogenic activities in which agriculture plays a significant role contributes to a rapid negative impact on the carbon cycle. The impact of agriculture on CO2 emissions will be further increased, considering that the world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 . EU has committed to mitigate the carbon footprint from agriculture as described in the CAP (Objective 4), the European Green Deal and its flagship strategies, the Farm to Fork and the Biodiversity strategies. The efficiency of these carbon footprint from agriculture strategies will be mainly determined by the synergy amongst all stakeholders (policy, industry, academia, civil society) in the quadruple helix within the place-based innovation ecosystems. The widening countries involved in this project, Cyprus, Greece and North Macedonia, as part of the Balkan-Mediterranean region, are heavily impacted by climate change. To achieve these targets an inter- and transdisciplinary approach is required to integrate the expertise and knowledge of all relevant stakeholders and a place-based perspective and design needs-based carbon farming solutions (practices and technologies) as well as strict policies to foster shifts towards a Climate-resilient Agriculture. The main objective of this project is to establish CARBONICA Excellence Hub by connecting the innovation ecosystems of Cyprus, Greece and North Macedonia, while enhancing their TRL as service providers, based on cutting-edge technologies (Earth Observation – EO; in situ data; digital agriculture etc.) in carbon farming. The main scope is to establish access to excellence to all relevant stakeholders in the QH of the WC, as well as strengthen regional innovation capacity guided by long-term joint R&I strategy in the carbon farming field.

The main objective of BioRural is to create a pan-European Rural Bioeconomy Network under which related stakeholders will cooperate to promote the currently available small-scale bio-based solutions in rural areas to increase the share of Bioeconomy, giving increased value in such remote areas. Such framework will contribute in bridging the gap between the available novel high-end bio-based solutions and the everyday European rural life by assessing the existing situation of European rural Bioeconomy, capturing grassroots-level needs and ideas, promoting effective exchange of knowledge and information and investigating the possible opportunities for regional development through the expansion of bio-based solutions integration in rural Europe. This way, BioRural will develop a transition framework towards a sustainable, regenerative, inclusive and just circular Bioeconomy across all Europe at local and regional scale and support innovators to scale-up inclusive and small-scale bio-based solutions in rural areas. To do so, the project will: (i) Assess and evaluate the current performance of the European rural Bioeconomy in the EU and identify factors affecting innovation adoption and diffusion of bio-based solutions in rural areas; (ii) Create four regional Rural Bioeconomy Platforms (RBPs) that will form a European Rural Bioeconomy Network (ERBN); (iii) Assess and promote success stories of bio-based solutions in rural areas; (iv) Develop and continuously optimise an online open stakeholders’ tool, named BioRural Toolkit; (v) Facilitate knowledge exchange and capacity building for the European rural Bioeconomy through a series of workshops in local, regional and European level; (vi) Create rural development blueprints for regional and business scale-up of resilient and circular bio-based solutions in rural areas and (vii) Disseminate and communicate all activities for maximum visibility and rural Bioeconomy expansion.