Multilingualism defines Indian cultural landscape and is recognized as both a strength and a challenge to deal with. In a country with over 325 languages and 25 scripts as listed by the Anthropological Survey of India, English remains an aspirational language creating a base for its economic success. However, the country is caught between learning this foreign language that heralds economic success and local languages that hold cultural richness, rootedness. The situation also divides the urban and rural India in terms of language proficiencies. Caught between these two extremities of having education in either only a local/regional language or completely in a foreign language leading to slow death of language, the country looks for a fair and balanced approach for the education system to respond. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) – a methodology adopted in Europe mainly to encourage bilingualism or multilingualism comes across as an ideal solution at this point for Indian education system to adapt. Therefore, a Consortium with HEIs in India and Europe proposes the project CLIL@India. CLIL@India plans the following actions:1. Establish an international inter-institutional CLIL Resources and Training Centre at Manipal; 2. Establish satellite centres for CLIL at all participating HEIs in the project for spill-over effect; 3. Develop CLIL training materials in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil and English;4. Develop and continuously update the webportal CLILatIndia.in to provide open access to CLIL study materials in India; 5. to implement the first CLIL academic modules at the Indian partner HEIs; 6. To disseminate information about CLIL methodologies developing open intensive courses and events; 6. To develop an evidence-based white-paper based on the impact of CLIL on the linguistic skills of pupils attending secondary education in India.

URGENT aims to promote green & blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions (GBI&NBS) for resilient, climate-friendly and liveable cities in IN & MN (partner countries – PCs) through ICT-enhanced tertiary education linked to labour markets & wider stakeholder circles. This aim will be achieved through the following objectives:1. To upgrade GBI&NBS -relevant BSc, MSc & PhD programs at PIs to make them end-user-oriented & policy-relevant. A pool of URGENT e-courses will be tailored to fit educational needs of learners from science, engineering & planning (154 ECTS of new and updated subjects openly available via e-learning). An URGENT research framework will outline internationally- & policy-relevant research topics, questions & methodology suggestions.2. To develop shared UREGENT Collaborative Learning Platform & online training services of the new generation for qualitative improvement of the education process & academic workflow support among universities & stakeholders (URBAN_learn).3. To create sustainable feedback mechanisms to end-users, ensuring adaptive & practice-relevant teaching contents, knowledge co-production opportunities and stakeholder support to post-project course development & teaching. URGENT stakeholder interactive platforms (SIPs) in PCs will assemble representatives of praxis communities involved to GBI&NBS issues. SIPs will be platforms for academia to disseminate innovative ideas, visions of the future and inform evidence-based management, while praxis partners contribute with their in-hand experiences & know-hows, review curricula, participate QA mechanisms & support graduates’ entry to workplace.4. To develop capacity for academic mobility, shared experimental facilities and joint research by PIs & beyond. URGENT partners will institutionalise their relationship through framework agreements, and set-up rules for physical & virtual mobility, joint research & thesis supervision and common use of research & experimental facilities.

The proposed Coordination and Support Action (CSA) has the overall objective to establish an international network of experts and stakeholders in the field of microbiome food system research, elaborating microbiomes from various environments such as terrestrial, plant, aquatic, food and human/animal and assess their applicability and impact on the food system. MICROBIOMESUPPORT will follow the approach of food system and integrate actors and experts from all stages in this circular economy of food. The food system approach is part of the FOOD 2030 concept to promote a systems approach to research and innovation (R&I). MICROBIOMESUPPORT will be one of the key drivers to implement FOOD 2030 strategies, will facilitate multi-actor engagement to align, structure and boost R&I in microbiome and will support the European Commission by coordinating the activities, meetings, workshops and results from the International Bioeconomy Forum (IBF) working group ‘Food Systems Microbiome’. The main concept behind MICROBI

The ecosystems of the dry tropics are in flux: the savannas, woodlands and dry forests that together cover a greater area of the globe than rainforests are both a source of carbon emissions due to deforestation and forest degradation, and also a sink due to the enhanced growth of trees. However, both of these processes are poorly understood, in terms of their magnitude and causes, and the net carbon balance and its future remain unclear. This gap in knowledge arises because we do not have a systematic network of observations of vegetation change in the dry tropics, and thus have not, until now, been able to use observations of how things are changing to understand the processes involved and to test key theories. Satellite remote sensing, combined with ground measurements, offers the ideal way to overcome these challenges, as it can provide regular, consistent monitoring at relatively low cost. However, most ecosystems in the dry tropics, especially savannas, comprise a mixture of grass and trees, and many optical remote sensing approaches (akin to enhanced versions of the sensors on digital cameras) struggle to distinguish changes between the two. Long wavelength radar remote sensing avoids this problem as it is insensitive to the presence of leaves or grass, and also is not affected by clouds, smoke or the angle of the sun, all of which complicate optical remote sensing. Radar remote sensing is therefore ideal to monitor tree biomass in the dry tropics. We have successfully demonstrated that such data can be used to accurately map woody biomass change for all 5 million sq km of southern Africa. In SECO we will create a network of over 600 field plots to understand how the vegetation of the dry tropics is changing. and complement this with radar remote sensing to quantify how the carbon cycle of the dry tropics has changed over the last 15 years. This will provide the first estimates of key carbon fluxes across all of the dry tropics, including the amount of carbon being released by forest degradation and deforestation and how much carbon is being taken up by the intact vegetation in the region. By understanding where these processes are happening, we will improve our knowledge of the processes involved. W will use these new data to improve the way we model the carbon cycle of the dry tropics, and test key theories. The improved understanding, formalised into a model, will be used to examine how the dry tropics will respond to climate change, land use change and the effects of increasing atmospheric CO2. We will then be able to understand whether the vegetation of the dry tropics will mitigate or exacerbate climate change, and we will learn what we need to do to maintain the structure of the dry tropics and preserve its biodiversity. Overall, SECO will allow us to understand how the vegetation of the dry tropics is changing, and the implications of this for the global carbon cycle, the ecology of savannas and dry forests, and efforts to reduce climate change. The data we create, and the analyses we conduct will be useful to other researchers developing methods to monitor vegetation from satellites, and also to those who model the response of different ecosystems to climate and other changes. Forest managers, ecologists and development practitioners can use the data to understand which parts of the world's savannas and dry forests are changing most, and how these changes might be managed to avoid negative impacts that threaten biodiversity and the livelihoods of the 1 billion, mostly poor, rural people who live in this region.