<< Background >>European projects often promote environmental education and sustainable development principles… But do we apply those principles to ourselves? Erasmus programme is one of the main achievements of the European integration. In 2019, this programme supported close to 940.000 learning experiences abroad and funded almost 25.500 project. What is the environmental impact of those activities and mobility? How to reduce it? This is the core subject of SUSTAIN E+ project.Many professionals are involved in the presentation and implementation of Erasmus + projects, from the conception of the project ideas to the monitoring of training activities. These professionals present a very heterogeneous group, with different professional profiles, experiences and responsibilities. Most of them have learnt how to work with Erasmus + on the ground, through the experience and opportunities presented. 2021 is a year of many changes, with a new Erasmus + programme that insists, among priorities, on the sustainable development and fight against climate change. We have experienced, with COVID 19 pandemic, a deep transformation of our working practices, turning non-essential travels into virtual. The digital tools that allow remote meetings, as well as webinars and online conferences, make it possible to reduce travel and increase the impact of projects. COVID has made possible to make an important leap in this regard, we must take advantage of the situation so that this way of working lasts as long as possible.For this, several training needs are identified:-First, a need to evaluate the contamination levels linked to the projects so to raise our awareness of our impact. Calculating the footprint of the different possible alternatives clearly reflects the options to reduce the impact and helps us make better decisions from an environmental point of view.-Then, increasing the level of knowledge and competences of project staff in the fields of sustainable transport, sustainable training activities, energy efficiency, project efficient management, digital solutions, etc. tackling the main areas of losses identified and significantly bettering our impact on environment. As a conclusion, SUSTAIN E+ arise from the need to train professionals in the implementation of sustainable and efficient Erasmus+ projects.<< Objectives >>The main objective (MO) of SUSTAIN E+ project is to develop guidelines addressed to workers involved in the development and implementation of Erasmus + projects and helping them in the design of eco-friendly project proposals, that takes into account the carbon footprint of their activities and intend to limit it thanks to more sustainable activities, especially regarding mobility. Thanks to Sustain E+, professional working with Erasmus + will be able to better evaluate their environmental impact, decrease it, and by extension will raise awareness of all Erasmus participants on their behaviours promoting sustainable actions. To go further in the achievement of this main objective, we have set 3 specific objectives, on which all the activities of this project will be focused:Specific Objective 1: Awareness raising from the professional from the sector about their environmental impact. People working with Erasmus + should get more concerned about their own impact and become more responsible at the time of planning their projects, thanks to different tools that will enable them to have a clear panorama of their different alternatives when planning an activity, and the contamination associated to each of them. Specific Objective 2: Training professionals working with Erasmus+ in the field of circularity and sustainability of EU projects, in a collective way, including:-Eco-design of a project that enable to decrease the impact since the design of the project idea in all areas of implementation.-Sustainable mobility guidelines, tackling the issue of transport, but also consumption while traveling. -Digital solutionsSpecific Objective 3: increasing the digitalisation of educational solutions. The restrictions applied during the pandemic have shown that digital solution can be effective alternatives to some activities that would have a higher footprint organised in a classic way. Thus, the digitalisation of training solution will be among the priorities of SUSTAIN E+ project.<< Implementation >>Our project will be formed by a consortium of 5 European entities from Spain, Poland, Italy and Greece and that are highly experienced in the implementation of Erasmus + projects. They are expert in environment, digital solutions, education, project management and mobility management. And they will bring those complementary experiences together to propose a set of activities designed to answer the project objectives. These activities will be: -Development of 3 main project results: an evaluation tool on Erasmus + projects and their environmental impact, training materials on sustainable Erasmus + project design and implementation, and a social based training platform that enjoin entities to form a new generation of partnerships that are more sustainable and with a reduce impact on the environment, sharing experiences and solutions. -A sustainable mobility, that will be organized at the beginning of the project and where professionals working with Erasmus + will experience in firsthand the definition of low-impact journey. During this experience, partners will have to answer the challenge of having a minimum impact while travelling and subsist in a foreign country. In the meanwhile, they will engage discussion on the definition of sustainability in a project and establish first criteria to be considered toward the certification of “green” project.-Sustainable events, that will be organized in each country at the end of the project as a way to promote the results achieved in a sustainable way. -And of course, all those activities will be supported by an efficient management system that will itself be designed with the idea of reducing the impact to the minimum, meaning fewer transnational meetings, more virtual meetings, a no-papers dissemination strategy, the optimization of online management tools, and a continuous reporting effort to spread our achievements.<< Results >>As a main result, our project has the ambition to answer to our main objective, the support of professional working with Erasmus + project to achieve the design and implementation of more sustainable – less contaminating Erasmus + projects. This will be achieved through the production of 3 main results:-An evaluation tool, called Erasmus + projects and their environmental impact. This tool will enable project staff to evaluate the impact of their initiatives. It will state criteria and levels of “acceptable” contamination, and will deliver a feedback on the evaluated project, thus providing information on the area of possible improvement to implement more eco-friendly project. It will deliver a green certificate to the good practices. -A training set, that proposes materials in different areas, such as transport, consumables, management, digital tools in order to upskills professionals working within the context of Erasmus + projects. These materials will be addressing the need of coordinating the activities in the frame of a partnership, thus taking into consideration the fact that Erasmus are projects that are implemented with different organisations requiring distance management tools. -A platform that brings together the previously mentioned materials on a digital and open format and beyond: that connect entities working with Erasmus + to share practices and learn from mutual experiences. At long term, our project expects to achieve the implementation of better and more efficient Erasmus + project on an environmental perspective, that also encourage better behaviours from all the participants to this programme, with a direct positive impact on our environment, contributing to the European Green Deal.

A methodology for tracking and analysing the needs for standardization and certification harmonization thorough the project life cycle will be defined and enforced, which will allow the early identification of issues related to the conceptualization, design, implementation, integration and deployment of tools for support the EU disaster resiliency; which will be facilitated by a complete consultation strategy to the different stakeholders that are expected to act at each capability development phase, ranging from providers to end users. On these grounds H2020-VALKYRIES will develop, integrate and demonstrate capabilities for enabling immediate and coordinated emergency response including search and rescue, security and health, in scenarios of natural/provoked catastrophes with multiple victims, with special application in cases in which several regions or countries are affected and hence greater interoperability being required. H2020-VALKYRIES will propose both design and development of a modular, interoperable, scalable and secure platform, which will allow the integration between legacy solutions and new technologies. The platform will be able to deploy services and dynamically adapt its behaviour, as the emergency requires it. A series of use cases and demonstrators will be developed placing an emphasis on cross-frontier and cross-sectorial BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) scenarios, where the usual communications infrastructure could have been damaged, and emergency response teams are deployed without an accurate view of the operation environment

Europe 2020 is the growth strategy for the EU and the Member States to achieve higher employability, productivity and social cohesion levels whereas the comparability of skills and qualifications across the countries is consistently underlined as important. Going through all the Official Reports or Recommendations of European bodies for the EU transparency tools, one can see that one of the major challenges for the EU is those of VET and the improvement of validation of learning outcomes obtained through different education pathways. In order to support this work and ensure that skills and qualifications can be easily recognised across borders, the European Area of Skills and Qualifications will be created as part of the Rethinking Education initiative of Europe 2020. Environmental protection is a major concern in Europe, having impact on industries and consumption choices, and being subject to regulation or standards. Environmental laboratories offer testing, sampling, inspection, certification, and verification technology to understand the impact of manufacturing companies on environment, having a growing influence and importance. Also, they should be a model for exemplary sustainable behaviour. For this reason, 7 partners representing 25 European countries form ECVET-Lab partnership that aspires to tackle the lack of a Qualification Standard/ Competence Profile on Sustainability among the personnel of Laboratories of Environmental Testing and Science by creating an OER Training Course which non-formal, work-based learning outcomes shall be recognised and validated by the ECVET System. The ECVET-Lab Qualification Standard will describe all duties and responsibilities a sustainably aware Technician (of Laboratories of Environmental Testing and Science) should have in order to carry out good environmental practices in the workplace and this content will be reflected in the Modular Training Course that will be created and structured following the ECVET principles. Thus all obtained non-formal work-based learning outcomes (knowledge, skills and competences) by its users shall be applicable in different countries thanks to the use of EU transparency tools. The use of the learning outcomes approach in the development of the ECVET-Lab Qualification Standard and Training Course reflects the project´s goal for their further validation, as this approach is the common key factor between the EU tools addressing the transparency of qualifications and competences (ECVET, EQF, EQAVET and Europass framework). ECVET-Lab project targets Technicians of Environmental Testing Laboratories, laboratories (especially SMEs) and related stakeholders (public institutions and authorities, VET providers, Research institutes, among others). It will involve directly the targets during different activities, especially the collection of good sustainable practices, which will be disseminated Europe wide to foster the exchange and application of better behaviours on the workplace. They will also be involved in the development of the training course for a better relevance of the training. Beside the interest of the participative approach for the quality and relevance of the OER, ECVET-Lab will lively involve a group of stakeholders in the project´s implementation process in order to legitimate and valorise the activities carried out and the delivered outcomes. What is more, all designed multiplier events will make sure that about 10.000 persons will benefit indirectly or will be target of the organised activities in order to involve more participants all along the project´s life for a higher quality of contacts and follow-up. ECVET-Lab project will be made of several activities, linked together to form a log frame matrix being apparently participative. First, all partners will be thoroughly informed by the projects ECVET expert, 3s Research Laboratory, on the ECVET System and its principles and how the Qualification Standard and Modular Training Course should be structured. Thus, in accordance with the prior indications, all partners will devote in finding the best case studies on good sustainable practices of the target sector and in creating the Qualification Standard, the Training Course content and the Training Platform. At short term, ECVET- Lab will have direct impact at local and regional level first on the target groups directly involved and then in the long term expand progressively the use of the Training Course to other SMEs and the implementation of the Qualification Standard in other countries thanks to the effective dissemination and networking strategy as well as the use of EU transparency tools. As a result form this project idea, the ECVET-Lab consortium aspires to contribute in the further use of the EU transparency tools for the recognition of learning outcomes derived from non-formal and informal learning pathways, especially OER.

PROSAFE proposes a novel doctoral training program in the multidisciplinary field combining machine learning, artificial intelligence, and process systems engineering with domain knowledge of process industry and process safety. PROSAFE will pioneer new foundations by integrating Quantitative Risk Assessment, Process Systems Engineering (PSE) with interpretable machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) disciplines as targeted breakthroughs to achieve the objectives. To this end, PROSAFE will develop new synergistic tools and train skilled professionals to address this very important societal, economic, and environmental challenge of safe and sustainable process industries. PROSAFE research objectives are: 1: Harmonize robust QRA methods and implementation strategies for effective and improved risk assessment and process safety 2: Develop AI and ML (interpretable ML) models using domain knowledge for efficient, safe, and reliable operations 3: Develop synergistic integration of model-based with data-based methods for improved process safety operation and monitoring 4: Demonstration and validation of PROSAFE novel concepts and methods on industrial relevant case studies for safer operation PROSAFE's major training objectives are: 1: Training of doctoral candidates (DCs) through individual projects combining multidisciplinary competences in the areas of AI, ML, and PSE within the domain of process safety 2: Establish and pilot the concept of a truly interdisciplinary European multicenter training program in AI/ML, QRA, and PSE within the domain of safety in process industries through relevant network-wide events, courses, workshops, and on-site industry training that complements training in soft skills for effective communication and entrepreneurship. Through this research and training program, PROSAFE will contribute to realizing the promising potential of the new artificial intelligence paradigm with a particular focus on process safety in process industries.