The objective of PoliRuralPlus is to foster a sustainable, balanced, equitable, place-based and inclusive development of rural and urban areas through improved connections, governance arrangements, and integrated territorial policies that prioritise experimentation and innovation in domains that favour bi-directional urban-rural synergies and the development of a well-being economy. Key focus will be driven by Foresight, planning and implementation of integrated urban-rural strategies. The PoliRuralPlus project aims to improve the quality of life for people living in urban and rural areas across the EU by promoting coordinated and collaborative development within the regions. The project will support 9 pilot projects (including 8 from the previous PoliRural project and 1 new project) that focus on developing rural-urban partnerships. The aim is to increase the resilience and interconnectedness of urban and rural areas. In terms of financing, the project will demonstrate successful application of funding mechanisms to support these partnerships, including public-private partnerships, crowdfunding, and other innovative financing models. The goal is to find sustainable financing solutions that can support the long-term development of these partnerships. PoliRuralPlus will validate an EU-wide regional-driven integrated territorial planning & implementation Action-Foresight Process & Tool Box, by extending the latter’s Innovation Hub through the European Digital Innovation Hubs using open-source System Dynamic Modelling & a GIS collaborative online service called Map Whiteboard, enhanced by up-to-date Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning (AI/DL) applicable algorithms. The project has an ambition to become an integral part of the New European Bauhaus due to its lighthouse success of gradual buildup of hands-on experience using up-to-date tools supporting decision-making process based on foresight principles.

The importance of biodiversity (BD) and healthy ecosystems and the services they deliver has increasingly been acknowledged. Policy initiatives, such as the EU BD Strategies 2020 and 2030, IPBES, IPCC and CBD were launched to address BD, natural capital and related values. Research has created a knowledge base to better understand nature-human interactions that are at the base of ecosystem services (ES) delivery. The key aim of related actions is to provide robust information that can be harnessed to support protection, restoration and sustainable as well as climate-neutral use of ecosystems in the EU by 2030. MAES has provided the conceptual, methodological and data base for comprehensive assessments on different spatial scales, including the EU-wide assessment (2020) and assessments in EU member states. Knowledge and data for different ecosystem types (including protected and marine areas) are increasingly available. The next step is to integrate the different MAES components (ecosystem mapping, condition, ES, accounting) and to enable the uptake of ES in decision making. Key challenges include the proof of BD-ecosystem condition-ES relationships and to link them to EU policies. The consortium brings together experts from all EU member states, associated countries and EU overseas regions with stakeholders from various public and private sectors. The expertise in the consortium includes leading experts (ecologists, economists, social scientists) on ES science, ecosystem accounting and on science-policy-business interfaces from related actions (OpenNESS, ESMERALDA, MAIA, MAES, ESP, IPBES, BD Partnership). Therefore, the project will successfully address the call's challenges and provide applicable tools and models together with guidance how to use them. The project will deliver real cases for an evidence-, ES-based and harmonised decision making across Europe, enabling transformative change to halt BD decline and to secure essential ES-sustainable supply and use.

STARGATEs contribution beyond state-of-the-art in applied climatic data solutions is the implementation of analytics models to support local and regional policy formulation and implementation related to mitigation on microclimate changes. Currently, policy making organizations predominantly utilize own data, typically limited to their own jurisdiction/administrative area. However, once the policy development process expands the evidence base and data sources beyond the traditional approach, there is need for global data. The addition of national, European and even global reference data sets for comparative analysis — including meteorological, climatic analysis, satellite data sources to improve decision making processes. The studies at landscape scale are required to understand leading ecological processes. The focus will be on Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) and will extensively study the benefits of applying agri-environment-climate technical solutions to achieve sustainable agricultural development at landscape level. It means to support farm management modernization and at the same time get to know the underlying ecological factors that shape the farming landscape. STARGATE will leverage access to this data and also STARGATE climatic platform including developed models platforms to foster easy and affordable adoption by policy making bodies. The simples approach to decision support in policy development is effective visualization of data. Good visualization supports the policy developers’ in modelling sustainable policies and decisions. Unlike algorithmic simulation and modelling, visualization leaves the actual decision and assessment to a human user and thus provides an extra quality assurance before actual policy decisions are made. STARGATE provides innovative components for visualization of big data with a particular emphasis on geospatial visualization and advanced, dynamic charting.

The DEMETER Project is a large-scale deployment of farmer centric interoperable smart farming-IoT based platforms delivered through a series of 20 pilots across 18 countries (15 States in the EU). Involving 60 partners, DEMETER adopts a multi-actor approach across the value chain (demand and supply), with 25 deployment sites, 6,000 farmers and over 38,000 devices and sensors being deployed and participants involved come from different production sectors (dairy, meat, vegetables, fruit and arable crops), production systems (conventional and organic) and different farm sizes and types, optimising the data analysis obtained across multiple farms. DEMETER will demonstrate the real-life potential of advanced standards-based interoperability between IoT technologies by adapting and extending existing standards into an over-arching Agricultural Information Model, concurrently ensuring security, privacy and business confidentiality across the full value chain in multiple agri-food operational environments. DEMETER will encompass a multi system and multi data source integration considering not only IoT but legacy systems, open data, geographical and satellite information, and in general will provide an open and interoperable data integration model. DEMETER displays how an integrated approach to business modelling and user acceptance can support sustainable farming and food production systems, provide safe food and support farmers in their decision-making in ‘doing more with less’. DEMETER will bring new business opportunities on the farm and in the wider agri-food economy, while concurrently contributing to the safeguarding of Europe’s precious natural resources. DEMETER’s goal is the creation of a secure and sustainable European IoT technology and business ecosystem whose impact could be transformative in the EC food and agriculture sector, and potentially across the world.

Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.