PATHS2INCLUDE will provide new, gender-sensitive, comparative knowledge-base on effective employment policies targeted at developing inclusive labour markets for persons in vulnerable situations in Europe. The study will examine the importance of intersectionality related to how context creates vulnerability, by focusing on three central labour-market processes: recruitment; career trajectories; and work exit. Through the involvement of national and European stakeholders, PATHS2INCLUDE aims to develop proposals for effective policies and to inform relevant policymakers with a view to maximising the project’s impact from a societal as well as scientific perspective. The project will combine diverse methods, data and disciplines (economics, political science and sociology) in innovative ways: (1) harmonised factorial survey experiment combined with qualitative interview studies with employers in four European countries (DE, NO, PL and RO); (2) causal analyses of comparative microdata; (3) microsimulation analysis exploiting the EUROMOD infrastructure. Linking the analyses of these data and the three central labour-market processes, will give original insights on how institutional and contextual factors shape barriers or mitigate risk of labour-market attachment among persons in vulnerable situations. These insights could include cross-national differences in employment-protection legislations and facilitation of care, regional differences in demand for labour, differences at company level related to the size of the firm, flexibilities in job tasks, and conditions that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, covering unemployment rates and infection-control measures across different segments of the labour market. The project will be implemented by an interdisciplinary consortium of seven research institutions and one European civil society organisation. The consortium has a balanced composition in terms of gender, stage of the career and area of expertise.

The EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ (Mission Ocean) aims at protecting and restoring the health of our ocean and waters through research and innovation, citizen engagement, and blue investments by 2030. The creation of the European Digital Twin Ocean (EU DTO) supports this mission as well as the key initiative of the European Commission, Destination Earth (DestinE), aiming at developing a highly accurate digital model of the Earth on a global scale to be able to monitor, simulate, and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities. Addressing the Horizon Europe call HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01-8, SEADITO focuses on the need for a targeted set of analytical methods and tools to support the development of the EU DTO including integrating social-ecological models in order to establish a comprehensive decision support platform. SEADITO aims at increasing transdisciplinary abilities of social-ecological models by updating and integrating them for improved Ecosystem-based Management, and a set of case studies in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean as well a Pan-European case study will provide the contexts for the multi-actor processes identifying user needs, as well as co-designing and testing components and services in the targeted user communities. The results will include sets of interoperable, spatial explicit, and DTO compliant social-ecological decision-support components based on FAIR principles (e.g. to be integrated with EDITO-Model Lab), as well as scalable and multi-level social-ecological models, integrated quantitative and qualitative social-ecological indicators, and workflows quantifying and integrating cultural and behavioural aspects. The components will be tested through an interactive spatial platform, the SEADITO Explorer equipped with visual demonstrators of social-ecological models and a Scenario Toolkit (WIST). Learning materials will target young researchers, decision-makers, and the public.

Science is essential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals implemented in the European Agenda 2030 towards the use of sustainable and clean energy. Solar energy, as the cleanest and the largest exploitable resource of energy, can potentially meet the growing requirements for the whole world’s energy needs beyond fossil fuels. Halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are considered as one of the most promising candidates for the next generation solar cells as their power conversion eciency (PCE) has rapidly increased up to 25.2%. With the goal to boost their commercialization, Fullerenes and derivatives have been introduced in PSC devices to improve the stability, suppress the hysteresis, and reduce the high temperatures commonly used to fabricate these devices. Developing novel fullerene derivatives for improving further the PCE and stability of PSCs is still highly desirable yet challenging. Nevertheless, it is not extensively explored the role of fullerene derivatives in PSC devices and it is still not thoroughly investigated how binding groups of fullerenes interact with perovskite surface and their influence in the electron mobility. In this project, the state-of-the-art computational chemistry will be used to understand the fullerene-perovskite interactions with the goal to rationally design new fullerene derivatives to improve the stability and efficiency of PSC devices. Density functional calculations will be employed to investigate the fullerene orientation on perovskite surfaces, binding energy, bandgap, the exciton delocalization and charge transfer in the fullerene-perovskite complexes in order to establish descriptors and correlations with the experimental data. The descriptors will be used to predict the preferred functionalization of fullerenes in order to conscientiously design the fullerene derivatives for PSC devices in order to take a step forward towards the future commercialization of these low-cost solar cell devices.