This project aims to provide for real-world implementations of Water Framework Directive (and other water related legislation), as well as the Circular Economy and EU Green Deal packages by showcasing and validating innovative next generation water resource solutions at pre-commercial demonstration scale. These solutions combine WATER management services with the recovery of value added renewable resources extracted/MINED from alternative water resources ("WATER-MINING"). The project will integrate selected innovative technologies that have reached proof of concept levels under previous EU projects. The value-added end-products (water, platform chemicals, energy, nutrients, minerals) are expected to provide regional resource supplies to fuel economic developments within a growing demand for resource security. Different layouts for urban wastewater treatment and seawater desalination are proposed, to demonstrate the wider practical potential to replicate the philosophy of approach in widening circles of water and resource management schemes. Innovative service-based business models (such as chemical leasing) will be introduced to stimulate progressive forms of collaboration between public and private actors and access to private investments, as well as policy measures to make the proposed water solutions relevant and accessible for rolling out commercial projects in the future. The goal is to enable costs for the recovery of the resources to become distributed across the whole value chain in a fair way, promoting business incentives for investments from both suppliers and end-users along the value chain. The demonstration case studies are to be first implemented in five EU countries (NL, ES, CY, PT, IT) where prior successful technical and social steps have already been accomplished. The broader project consortium representation will be an enabler to transferring trans-disciplinary project know-how to the partner countries while motivating and inspiring relevant innovations throughout Europe.

The ambition of the TRANSFORMER project is to design long-term systemic transformation frameworks for regions across Europe in order to accelerate the shift towards climate neutrality. At the onset of the project, a conceptual framework will be developed by mapping, defining, and categorising Transition Super-Labs (TSLs). Actual TSLs will be piloted in four regions: the Ruhr area, DE, Emilia Romagna, IT, Lower Silesia, PL and Western Macedonia, GR. The project will develop a roadmap blueprint, a toolkit (incl. matchmaking mechanisms) and a knowledge hub, on the one hand to support the pilot regions but also to be applied by other regions across Europe. Moreover, an evaluation framework will be developed in order to evaluate the impact of TSLs in the TRANSFORMER pilot regions, as well as the respective tools and structures applied by the pilot regions. Project activities will be accompanied by comprehensive communicate and disseminate activities, providing (intermediate) results of the project and the activities in the pilot TSLs, providing a Hub with information, and offering training and capacity building activities for various target groups and stakeholders. Finally, an Exploitation Plan will be prepared for a long-lasting impact of the project.

According to the European Research Data Landscape – Final report, a survey involving almost 9,898 responders, highlighted some of the main barriers to management and sharing of research data: time, effort, storage, skills required, and the lack of recognition and data protection. RAISE Suite will develop a system specifically designed to remove barriers to data sharing, replacing technological achievements that do not influence researchers’ attitude towards sharing data. To do so, RAISE Suite will develop the solutions required to automate the process from data collection to dataset generation, guided by a FAIR-by-design principle to remove barriers such as perceived effort, time, as well as skills required for data sharing. At the same time, EOSC-RAISE will be integrated into RAISE Suite, for a platform which supports simple dataset sharing and exploitation, mitigating the sense of lack of recognition and data protection among researchers. Furthermore, RAISE Suite will implement a DMP-guided data collection and management policy. In particular, RAISE Suite will not only adopt a Machine Actionable Data Management Plan (ma-DMP), but further extend it to support designated actions, τurning the persistent identifier DMP-ID into the main reference point for the whole data lifecycle, following research activities, making the connections with underlying algorithms and data, and updating the DMP accordingly from collection, depositing and storing, to discovery, management, processing, reusing and exploitation. RAISE Suite capitalises on the results of a previously funded EC initiative. To this end, RAISE Suite will leverage work done by the EOSC-RAISE project, incorporating its technical platform that moves from open data to data open for processing, introducing the technology required to cover the data lifecycle from the data collection to the dataset generation.

FARCLIMATE will address the critical challenges of developing and expanding climate-resilient measures, making them available and understandable to everyone, while also paying special attention to the social, political and economic barriers that are commonly found. FARCLIMATE actions will be implemented in at least 20 regions and communities in Europe, i.e., case studies where we will address transformative solutions on the path to climate resilience. In order to achieve such a great challenge, FARCLIMATE has set the following work program: 1) Initial work on engaging with all relevant stakeholders in each region, setting governance management mechanism; 2) Establishment of living labs to perform co-creation, testing, experimenting and scaling-up innovative activities in real-life environments; 3) A deep research of the main value chains, of the socioeconomic and environmental characteristics and of the existing economic sectors, through indicators to be monitored, of all investigated regions and communities; 4) Establishment of the transversal actions to be performed in all case studies: tailor-made training activities for communities empowerment, targeting different types of stakeholders and based among climate change and related hazards and risks; 5) The implementation of technical but also socially feasible innovative solutions in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries economic sectors, with specific solutions to increase their capacity to adapt to climate change impacts on their fields. Nature-based solutions will be the guiding thread in FARCLIMATE innovative actions; 6) The creation of different tools to spread the obtained learnings, found barriers, and successful results, among others, during FARCLIMATE, such as policy recommendations, guidelines, management plans and the innovative Transformation Hub.