Rangeland livestock farming systems (RLFS), despite facing challenges, play a significant role in achieving the sustainable development goals in Europe. Although RLFS have an important role in the transition towards the European Green Deal, with the provision of crucial ecosystem services, they still require support, including extension services, farmer to farmer network and participatory monitoring and evaluation. The use of innovative technologies has an important role to play and take part of a wider bundle of measures required to improve the future viability of such farming systems. DIGI-Rangeland network aims to create and expand an innovative network about digital innovations and data technologies with actors (farmers and other land-users) facing challenges in rangeland territories at regional, national, and European levels. Based on a multi-actor approach, the project aims to increase knowledge sharing and mutual understanding between EU stakeholders, and foster cross-fertilization between rangeland areas actors around the use of digital technologies and innovations (DTI). To achieve this, partners in 10 countries will be involved in: a) setting up an EU network with farmers groups, land-users, 10 innovation and demonstration HUBs, and important stakeholders in the 10 rural-AKIS; b) identifying, prioritising, and analysing needs, obstacles and expectations from farmers and land-users; c) identifying and analysing DTI solutions matching the needs of the RLFS farmers and other land-users; d) evaluating and assessing solutions and barriers, to foster DTI adoption within RFLS; e) improving knowledge level with a range of scaling activities, demonstrations, and training, for farmers, advisors, students, land-users. Partners will prepare and implement communication and dissemination activities through trusted channels to maximise the impact of the project’s outputs.

The Ocean plays a crucial role in the global C cycle, taking up approximately 25% of the CO2 we emit to the atmosphere, and thus slowing the rate of climate change. The future trajectory of this sink will affect the timing and intensity of the modifications to human processes that we need to undertake in order to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at 450ppm. Our ability to measure and model this sink is limited (evidenced by significant discrepancies between measured and modelled C uptake) with the current frontier area of research being a suite of biological processes related to higher trophic level behaviour within the so called biological C pump. This involvement of higher organisms suggests that human activities (fishing, energy and mineral extraction) has the capacity to affect the ocean C sink however we lack the ability to quantitatively link direct human pressures and ocean C storage. Ocean ICU will measure these key processes and evaluate their overall significance, transferring those that are important into models that inform the IPCC process and in this way contribute to resolving the observed model data mismatch of Ocean C sink estimates. We will take this message directly to the COP in support of the ambition the UNFCCC has to include the ocean C sink in the global stocktake. We will use the fundamental knowledge we acquire around biological systems to evaluate the ability of human interventions in the ocean to alter the carbon cycle and produce management tools that allow the tension between resource extraction and C storage to be addressed. This component will involve extensive dialogue with end users and stakeholders and lead to a Decision Support Tool that will constitute a major contribution to our ability to deliver the Green Deal by allowing us to ask questions around how to manage fisheries and resource extraction in a changed ocean in 50 years time.

Plant pests and pathogens damage agricultural production and endanger food security. Their control relies heavily on the use of synthetic insecticides, leading to a negative environmental impact. Developing new methods for pest and pathogen control is therefore essential to safeguard human health and meet the challenge of increasing crop yields, while reducing the use of chemical pesticides. The overarching objective of the NextGenBioPest project is to meet this need by delivering novel and improved products, methods, and practices for the rational control of the most difficult-to-manage arthropod pests and pathogens, with substantially reduced pesticide use. The project will provide a new toolkit for plant protection in key vegetable and fruit crops including diagnostics for pest and pathogen identification and incrimination, novel Biological Control Agents and methods to augment their performance in the field, RNA-based pesticides, Low Risk/Green chemicals, plant resistance inducers and innovative agronomic and ecological practices. These innovations will be integrated with existing approaches, to achieve effective, environment friendly and sustainable crop protection. They will be validated in large field studies, with both their efficiency and socioeconomic impact assessed. Demonstration fields, extensive training and modern targeted communication channels, will enable the appropriate dissemination and uptake of the outcomes to the stakeholders and end users. Data protection and commercialization strategies will ensure their exploitation. These goals will be achieved by integrating leading institutional and industrial partners with drivers of pest control programs. The multidisciplinary and multi-actor team will exploit their diverse expertise, access to extensive preliminary data and resources, and strong networks, to meet the project objectives and ensure the knowledge and tools generated deliver economic, ecological and societal impact.

Climate change is affecting the ecosystem’s resilience, biodiversity, productivity, and health. One major societal issue is to secure food destined for human consumption. Fish are the primary resource for essential fatty acids and proteins for billions of people and they contribute significantly to species diversity and functioning of marine, estuarine, and freshwater ecosystems. Yet, we are still limited in our ability to accurately predict how climate-change stressors will affect fish populations. To date, we are crucially lacking studies evaluating the impacts of climate change linking subfields of fish ecology such as genetics, behaviour, physiology, community dynamics or spatial ecology. Other essential aspects of climate-change impacts, such as cross-generational effects and sex-specific responses of parents that could adaptively prepare the offspring, are also often ignored. The proposed project has three main objectives: (1) investigate the effects of parental thermal stress on offspring’s coping abilities to face multiple climate stressors, (2) evaluate the impact of thermal stress on sex-specific response and decipher the sex-specific parental effects on the next generation, and (3) identify, in collaboration with stakeholders from aquaculture and fishery sectors, mitigation strategies that can mediate these effects. CAPWARM includes laboratory and field work on two valuable salmonid species for human consumption: the Rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, and the Atlantic Salmon, Salmo salar. The first accounts for 60% of EU freshwater fish farming, while the second is the first produced marine fish but is paradoxically declared at risk in most European waters. The results will be further discussed along with management practices available to mitigate parental thermal stress, in both aquaculture and wild contexts. CAPWARM outputs will be of high importance for fisheries, aquaculture, and conservation and fits with the climate action top priority of the EU.