NURISH aims to enhance climate resilience and sustainable development in rural and small urban communities by implementing transformative nature-based, technological and circular economy solutions. It supports the EU’s long-term vision for stronger, connected, resilient, and prosperous rural areas by 2040, contributing to territorial cohesion, innovation, job creation, skills development, better infrastructure and sustainable agriculture. The project will develop the Regenerative Rural Resilience Framework to help rural areas mitigate climate risks through nature-based solutions (NBS), fostering entrepreneurship and creating green jobs. Resilience Hubs (RHs) in Greece, Cyprus, Finland and the UK will demonstrate tailored NBS to address flooding, water scarcity and land degradation, while digital tools will support real-time monitoring and decision-making. Communities in the demonstration and replication areas will actively participate in the EU Rural Pact, promoting rural perspectives, fostering collaboration and advancing nature restoration and conservation through NBS. By sharing knowledge and scaling solutions across rural regions, NURISH ensures its strategies are adaptable and replicable throughout Europe, contributing to the EU Green Deal, the Climate Adaptation Strategy and rural prosperity goals by 2040.

People Oriented Transport and Mobility (POTM) holds a great promise for tackling some of the most persistent urban and peri-urban sustainable mobility challenges of common interest to EU cities. Even though researchers, practitioners and policy makers are aware of this potential, the current research and innovation framework is plagued by a surprising lack of evidence and transformative POTM solutions. Cities-4-People brings together a multidisciplinary consortium to introduce a community-driven POTM framework based on participatory, inclusive and transparent innovation processes. We incorporate collective awareness and open innovation to understand the real needs of EU citizens and co-create new mobility solutions with them, harnessing digital and social innovation. Based on a local community setting and supported by cross-disciplinary teams and a comprehensive suite of collaborative technologies (both online and offline), citizens along with public and private city stakeholders will co-develop concepts and endorse concrete solutions – inspired by growing mobility trends (e.g. shared mobility and connected mobility). The best solutions will be put to the real test in a thorough pilot and scale up program in 5 different EU urban areas with rich diversity in terms of size, population density and socio-economic context. In parallel, the project will introduce an open process to co-develop a common Core Outcome Set of definitions, metrics, indicators and methods to guide POTM impact assessment and place, for the first time, the citizen into the equation. We will use this common baseline throughout our evaluations together with some less traditional techniques (e.g. people as sensors, real time user feedback). We believe that this work will act as the first open standard in POTM and will open up the way not only for the structuring of this young research field, but also for the attraction of interest from entrepreneurs, companies as well as investors (social or not).

FRONTIER aims to provide the network and integrated traffic management strategies of the future, taking into account new types and modes of transport and automated vehicles (including their logical and physical requirements), the minimization of pollution and capacity bottlenecks (including congestion and traffic jams), the reduction of accidents, and the need to reduce the cost of mobility for all users (both citizens, public authorities and businesses). On the operational level FRONTIER facilitates the transition towards resilient multimodal autonomous mobility by establishing the processes of collaboration and arbitration among stakeholders while developing the business models that will address the commercial viability of the identified solutions. FRONTIER will develop, apply and test autonomous management systems, secured by design, that will constantly evolve using data generated from real-time monitoring of the transportation system, knowledge generated by operators and decision makers, and simulation models providing system optimal solutions accounting for new mobility services and technologies. These systems will support and enact proactive decisions, realising our vision to empower a seamless transition to an autonomous and integrated transport management for future mobility services. FRONTIER will be validated in three pilot sites (Oxfordshire UK, Athens GR and Antewerp BE) focusing on three main themes: Smart Infrastructures and CAVs integration; Multimodal mobility for passengers and freight cross-stakeholders collaboration; Network performance analysis for planning and policy making. To materialize this concept, FRONTIER follows an efficient multidisciplinary approach bringing together partners from 5 universities and research institutes, 7 companies, 5 transport authorities from three diverse European countries, one testbed for traffic management and one international road federation.

Healthcare, transport and food verticals are hugely important in Europe, in terms of jobs, size (collectively surpassing €3Trillion) and export trade. Moreover, they are vital from a social perspective, for better patient outcomes, safer transportation and safer and more sustainable food production. 5G is important for these verticals, in terms of improvements for utility, efficient processes, safety among others. 5G-HEART (validation trials) will focus on these vital vertical use-cases of healthcare, transport and aquaculture. In the health area, 5G-HEART will validate pillcams for automatic detection in screening of colon cancer and vital-sign patches with advanced geo-localization as well as 5G AR/VR paramedic services. In the transport area, 5G-HEART will validate autonomous/assisted/remote driving and vehicle data services. Regarding food, focus will be on 5G-based transformation of aquaculture sector (worldwide importance for Norway, Greece, Ireland). The infrastructure shared by the verticals, will host important innovations: slicing as a service; resource orchestration in access/core and cloud/edge segments with live user environments. Novel applications and devices (e.g. underwater drones, car components, healthcare devices) will be devised. Trials will run on sites of 5G-Vinni (Oslo), 5Genesis (Surrey), 5G-EVE (Athens), as well as Oulu and Groningen, which will be integrated to form a powerful and sustainable platform where slice concurrency will be validated at scale. The consortium includes major vertical players, research/academic institutions and SMEs. Partners have proven know-how in 5G, vertical applications, standardisation, business modelling, prototyping, trials, demonstrations. 5G-HEART KPI validation ensures improved healthcare, public safety, farm management and business models in a 5G market, stimulating huge business opportunities within and beyond the project.

HARMONY envisages developing a new generation of harmonised spatial and multimodal transport planning tools which comprehensively model the dynamics of the changing transport sector and spatial organisation, enabling metropolitan area authorities to lead the transition to a low carbon new mobility era in a sustainable manner. Co-creation labs are established in order for citizens, authorities and industry to design together new mobility and spatial organisation concepts. At the same time, demonstrations with electric AVs, and drones take place to understand in real-life their requirements. Market surveys are organised to elicit people and freight actors' preferences and reactions towards the co-created concepts and the demonstrated new mobility technologies. The HARMONY model suite is designed to assess the multidimensional impacts of the new mobility concepts and technologies. The model suite integrates: 1. land-use models (strategic/long-term), 2. people and freight activity based models (tactical/mid-term), and 3. multimodal network (operational/short-term) models allowing for vertical planning. This integrated approach is necessary for authorities to understand if policies are sustainable, while also contribute to meeting COP22 targets, social equality and wellbeing. The HARMONY model suite is also linked to an EU-wide model to further identify the impact of the concepts and technologies on the TEN-T level. HARMONY's concepts and the model suite are applied and validated on six EU metropolitan areas on six TEN-T corridors: 1. Rotterdam(NL), 2. Oxfordshire(UK), 3. Turin(IT), 4. Athens(GR), 5. Trikala(GR), 6. Upper Silesian-Zaglebie Metropolis(PL). By having six different areas as pilots, we will be able to propose to authorities, spatial and transport planners, concepts and technologies for different types of areas/cities