RRI-LEADERS adopts a meso-level approach, and will explore the application and sustainability of the RRI paradigm within territorial innovation systems. In RRI-LEADERS a “territory” is understood as a confluence between three interconnected primary aspects: geographical location, socio-economic and cultural bonds, and administrative authority. The project will involve four distinct territories from different parts of Europe, representing different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, different scope of territorial oversight, different institutional and decision-making infrastructures, different R&I landscapes, and different dynamics among territorial actors. As such, the four territories will represent a diverse range of opportunities and implications for RRI, which will enable the RRI-LEADERS consortium to carry out a thorough assessment of the RRI relevance to territorial governance and have the involved territories act as demonstrators for the potential of RRI on subnational level. The partners will engage in a multi-stage co-creation process (referred to as RRI-AIRR) that will mobilise territorial quadruple helix stakeholders towards the elaboration of future-oriented strategy and action plans - territorial outlooks for each of the participating territories. Territorial partners will have the leading role in this process, and will additionally work to ensure the broadest societal and governance-level endorsement. The Consortium will further use the accumulated knowledge to chart a detailed outlook for the future potential of RRI as a guiding framework in territorial governance of R&I, and will aim to provide an evolutionary perspective on RRI for the upcoming Horizon Europe programme.

Most of us live in cities, even though cities are not the healthiest places due to poor air quality, noisy surroundings and lack of recreational spaces. Many cities have few green areas and consist of too much ‘concrete jungle’ which makes for a harsh environment for all living things. With the changing climate, the weather is expected to become more extreme. One such effect will be urban heat islands, which will be even more profound, with heatwaves expected to increase 3 to 10-fold by 20801 depending on the climate scenario. A way of tackling all these issues, is to plant more trees within the urban fabric - a well-recognised, and relatively cheap and efficient measure for cities to adapt to future climatic challenges. In view of this, the ambition of 100KTREEs is to make cities a better and healthier place to live by encouraging municipalities to plant more trees and to optimise the impact of tree planting. The team will support cities by mapping the existing trees and by showing a solid business case for planting new trees, as well as attracting third party sponsorship to make it happen. We need to plant trees now to allow our children to enjoy their shade in 20 years’ time. 100KTREEs will develop a mapping and modelling toolbox to optimise the planting of trees and to monitor the health of the trees, based on Copernicus and in-situ data. By assigning monetary value to the key attributes of a tree, e.g. pollution absorption, cooling effect, noise abatement, flood risk reduction and increased biodiversity, a number of business cases will be developed for our two partner cities, Copenhagen and Sofia. Such business cases will also be used to attract third party financing. By means of a crowd science app we will engage with citizens and create awareness of the wonders of trees, also extending to improved life quality and mental health impacts.

The COMPAIR innovation project is designed to bolster citizens' capacity to monitor, understand, and change their environmental impact, both at a behavioural and policy level. It unlocks the power of the wider public, including people from lower-socio economic groups, to provide broad granular data around a central theme of air quality, complementing and improving the quality of official datasets and making new information useful for helping to meet environmental aims. The project will achieve its aim by empowering people using a Citizen Science Lab - with a special focus on women, young people, and hard-to-reach groups ? to provide the skills to co-design and undertake environmental scientific experiments around needs and challenges in their locality. By providing innovative, self-assembly, low-cost sensors, dynamic dashboards, and augmented reality tools for collecting, visualising and extracting actionable intelligence from data, anyone regardless of their background, can understand their impact on the environment and explore immediate actions to improve it. Beyond helping to mitigate bad environmental habits at an individual and community level, CS (Citizen Science) data will also be used to mutually enrich other public and private data sources in official city decision making platforms. Thereby helping to increase civic engagement and influence more effective long-term environmental policy. Piloted in the Region of Flanders and the major cities of Athens, Berlin and Sofia, communities, businesses, researchers and public administrations will, for the first time, adopt and benefit from a technology-enabled, collective approach to evidence gathering that fills gaps in existing data sources, and provides new routes to innovation. COMPAIR will raise awareness of, and provide a CS Lab Toolkit, to ensure CS is a trusted approach to tackling complex, systemic and environmental problems that require different perspectives.

SYNCLUSIVE is an innovative, integral, and interdisciplinary systems’ approach to stimulate inclusion of vulnerable groups in the labor market. To achieve this, our six central objectives are: 1) developing and consolidating a coalition of stakeholders in 4 regional Living Labs across Europe along the lines of the Community Coalition Action Theory, using the ENGINE approach. This approach includes an integrated package of interventions that stimulates upward and sideward mobility of vulnerable employees, hereby creating vacancies for inflow of vulnerable job seekers; 2) testing the usefulness and applicability of the ENGINE approach for different vulnerable groups identified as being discriminated against; 3) identifying drivers and barriers for mobility and inflow including discrimination; 4) assessing the impact of the implemented ENGINE approach on the labor market mobility and inclusion of vulnerable groups; 5) identifying transition pathways from the regional to the national and EU policy level; and 6) identifying interoperable and comparative indicators and standards that are relevant for the labor market inclusion of vulnerable groups taking into account the regional, national (legislative, social security) and cultural context. Regional stakeholder commitment as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial for the success of SYNCLUSIVE and for inclusion of vulnerable people in the labor market. SYNCLUSIVE therefore collaborates in an ‘active community coalition’ amongst municipalities, employers, civil society and educational institutes, which interacts with their political counterparts at national and EU level across 7 European regions. SYNCLUSIVE results will lead to sustainable inclusion of vulnerable groups in the regional Living Labs, and have vast potential to result in outcomes far beyond the scope and duration of the project. SYNCLUSIVE will contribute to generic and context-specific EU-wide policy and intervention recommendations that drive inclusion of vulnerable groups and help to start overcoming discrimination in the EU labour market.