TWILIGHTED is a groundbreaking Horizon Europe Twinning project that seeks to revolutionize deep-sea research, development and innovation (RD&I) in Portugal, ultimately benefiting all of Europe. Collaborating closely with the esteemed European institutions of GEOMAR (Germany) and NTNU (Norway), TWILIGHTED aims to transform ARDITI (Madeira, Portugal) into a global hub for deep-sea RD&I. Focusing on the challenging Mesophotic Zone (40-200m) and the enigmatic Twilight Zone (200-1,000m), and capitalizing on Madeira's unique proximity to deep waters, TWILIGHTED will help accelerate our global understanding of the ocean and its essential role in sustaining life on earth. TWILIGHTED’s key objectives are to: (1) Collaborate across research institutes in Europe, (2) Elevate the research profile of Portugal and especially the European Outermost Region of Madeira, (3) Innovate low-cost alternatives to state-of-the-art deep-sea research technologies, (4) Democratize deep-sea research, (5) Globalize deep-sea RD&I and (6) Share ocean science across stakeholders. To achieve its objectives, TWILIGHTED will adopt state-of-the-art approaches to training and networking. Development activities include staff exchanges, expert visits, training schools, joint research missions, the International Twilighted Conference and novel cross-sector workshops stimulating creativity in solving the ocean’s greatest challenges (the Impossible Things Workshops). Such capacity-building will not only catalyze deep-sea RD&I in Madeira, but ensure a lasting impact on the deep-sea scientific landscape, sustainable ocean policy and Madeira’s socioeconomic development. TWILIGHTED marks the start of a transformative journey for Portugal, redefining its role in understanding and protecting vital deep-sea ecosystems. TWILIGHTED will also facilitate greater diversity and collaboration in time-critical matters of ocean sustainability and leave a significant mark on the global pursuit for more democratic science.

The growing innovation divide across the European Union appears particularly detrimental to small and emerging regional research and innovation systems like the Outermost Regions. With limited resources, these regions struggle to reach the critical mass needed to build comparative advantages and become knowledge societies. Though the European Research Area and the Framework programmes could compensate this marginalization through greater knowledge circulation, resources sharing and talents mobilities, the Outermost Regions present a limited participation in FP7 and Horizon 2020. This underutilization notably stems from the competing relations between structural funds (ESIF) and the framework programs or “substitution effect”: many organizations and individuals prioritize easily accessible ESIF, decide not to apply to the FP and end up in “substitution trap” which isolates them from promising collaborations. To move Outermost Regions’ R&I organizations and systems from substitution to synergies, REMORA ambitions to transform 3 Ocean and Marine ESIF-funded institutions in La Réunion, Madeira and the Azores into Horizon Europe champions : CITEB, OKEANOS and OOM. To that end, REMORA will enhance their competitiveness (notably human resources, knowledge transfer and innovation capacities), strategic positioning and connections with major EU networks through a joint internationalization strategy. REMORA will then use the successful transformation of these 3 role models to lead other ESIF-oriented R&I organizations and policy-makers in Outermost and Widening Regions on the path to synergies.

MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.

The Grassroot Wavelengths project will create a game changing network of inclusive digital platforms for citizen engagement, community deliberation, and the free flow of information within, into, and out of discrete geographic communities by piloting solutions for connected, inexpensive, community owned and operated radio across Europe. Our approach includes features of the Living Lab and Participatory Design methods for setting up stations and services and understanding the processes in which they will be used and appropriated, along with an emphasis on synthetic speech to support the curation of audio content, thus turning data into media. Building on the success of the existing RootIO platform – with its proven commons-oriented technology and catalytic capacities for promoting/enabling collective awareness and action, participatory innovation, community resilience, and media pluralism – we will: 1) deploy and test a network of low-power community radio stations in Ireland, Portugal, and Romania; 2) work with community groups, journalists, and public good experts to develop a robust platform for expansion across Europe; 3) enhance use and accessibility of networked community radio through text-to-speech, community oriented programming applications, and other community-supported modes for contributing and managing content); and 4) work within the EU framework to establish a public support infrastructure for local ownership and revenue generation. Together, these four actions combine to form a robust and tested platform with a clear path to scaling and exploitation in Europe and beyond.

The CLIMAREST project - Coastal Climate Resilience and Marine Restoration Tools for the Arctic Atlantic basin - integrates multiple expertise into a holistic approach, to develop a toolbox designed to establish guidelines for ecosystem restoration and to enhance climate resilience in coastal communities. The concept is to develop, test and optimise a modular toolbox that integrates expert knowledge, scientific information, multilevel stakeholder and community involvement, ecosystem service improvement analysis, cost-benefit analysis, priority of actions, and custom designed protocols for restoring and monitoring multiple coastal habitats. The toolbox framework will have common and specific tools that will be tested, optimised and demonstrated in five different ecosystems, across a latitudinal gradient of the Arctic-Atlantic basin, ranging from the high-Arctic Svalbard (79° N) in the North to the Madeira archipelago (33° N) in the South. The variety of environmental conditions and restoration needs of the five demonstration sites will provide different restoration scenarios with particular specificities in terms of biodiversity, pressures and threats, ecosystems services and stakeholders. The diversity in restoration scenarios will create a unique opportunity to develop a modular toolbox, that integrates common tools with tools that are specific for each restoration scenario into a collective framework. Ecosystem-specific innovations in nature-based solutions for habitat restoration that improve local climate resilience will also be developed, tested, and integrated into a general toolbox framework, establishing guidelines and innovative workflows. The toolbox and tools developed in each demonstration site, for different restoration scenarios, will be made available and tested for replication and upscaling in comparable ecosystems and similar communities, with particular emphasis in promoting stakeholder involvement.