Despite international and European policies in place to halt biodiversity loss, the effect of multi-level, and multi-sector, direct and indirect drivers of change contribute to continuing negative trends. The BioValue proposal was designed upon the fact that persistent land use and land cover changes have a major effect on biodiversity loss; and on the assumption that a transformative change is needed on paradigms, goals and values shaping current spatial dynamics by a mix of sectoral policies. Such transformative change is in line with the IPBES (2020) report and the EU biodiversity strategy 2030 calling for co-responsible engagement of all relevant actors, in a whole-of-society approach to biodiversity. To address this call, we will explore the transformative potential of spatial planning, as the arena for action and the territorial expression of multi-level policies, strategic to invert current trends of biodiversity loss. The objective of BioValue is to safeguard and increase biodiversity by better articulating three instrumental perspectives - spatial planning, environmental assessment, and economic and financing instruments -, individually and in combined action. BioValue builds upon knowledge created by several EU projects, including a conceptual framework on transformative change to be adapted for analysing the potential of instruments and their interactions in local case-studies. Transformative potential lies in: a) focussing on key steps of the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimize and off-set) b) addressing indirect drivers, i.a. by guiding the operationalisation of the renewed EU finance strategy within spatial planning to avoid significant harm and to ensure redesign of potentially harmful projects in the design phase, and c) by providing better articulated instruments for mainstreaming biodiversity concerns into other sectors across different levels of governance.

The importance of biodiversity (BD) and healthy ecosystems and the services they deliver has increasingly been acknowledged. Policy initiatives, such as the EU BD Strategies 2020 and 2030, IPBES, IPCC and CBD were launched to address BD, natural capital and related values. Research has created a knowledge base to better understand nature-human interactions that are at the base of ecosystem services (ES) delivery. The key aim of related actions is to provide robust information that can be harnessed to support protection, restoration and sustainable as well as climate-neutral use of ecosystems in the EU by 2030. MAES has provided the conceptual, methodological and data base for comprehensive assessments on different spatial scales, including the EU-wide assessment (2020) and assessments in EU member states. Knowledge and data for different ecosystem types (including protected and marine areas) are increasingly available. The next step is to integrate the different MAES components (ecosystem mapping, condition, ES, accounting) and to enable the uptake of ES in decision making. Key challenges include the proof of BD-ecosystem condition-ES relationships and to link them to EU policies. The consortium brings together experts from all EU member states, associated countries and EU overseas regions with stakeholders from various public and private sectors. The expertise in the consortium includes leading experts (ecologists, economists, social scientists) on ES science, ecosystem accounting and on science-policy-business interfaces from related actions (OpenNESS, ESMERALDA, MAIA, MAES, ESP, IPBES, BD Partnership). Therefore, the project will successfully address the call's challenges and provide applicable tools and models together with guidance how to use them. The project will deliver real cases for an evidence-, ES-based and harmonised decision making across Europe, enabling transformative change to halt BD decline and to secure essential ES-sustainable supply and use.

STARDUST serves as smart connector bringing together advanced European cities and citizens of Pamplona (ES), Tampere (FI) and Trento (IT) - with the associated follower cities of Derry (UK), Kozani (GR) and Litomerice (CZ). These six cities, collaborating with relevant industrial partners, including a variety of innovative local SME, and supported by academia and research centres will demonstrate three lighthouse cities, deploy intelligent integration measures, test and validate technical solutions and innovative business models, and deliver blueprints for replication throughout Europe and abroad. The objective of STARDUST project is to pave the way towards the transformation of the carbon supplied cities into Smart, high efficient, intelligent and citizen oriented cities, developing urban technical green solutions and innovative business models, integrating the domains of buildings, mobility and efficient energy through ICT, testing and validating these solutions, enabling their fast roll out in the market . The core idea of the STARDUST project is the demonstration of different “innovation islands” as urban incubators of technological, social, regulatory and market solutions which, once validated, could contribute to this objective of transformation of our cities towards Smart Cities. The integrated approach of STARDUST is based in the combination of technological solutions with human being reflected in joint decision making, economic constraints, citizen’s governance, etc. The STARDUST Smart City concept has been designed to enhance the integration of all these aspects to define a new Urban Metabolism.

The “Smart City” paradigm aims to support new forms of monitoring and managing of resources as well as to provide situational awareness in decision-making fulfilling the objective of servicing the citizen, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects. Considering the city as a complex and dynamic system involving different interconnected spatial, social, economic, and physical processes subject to temporal changes and continually modified by human actions. Big Data, fog, and edge computing technologies have significant potential in various scenarios considering each city individual tactical strategy. However, one critical aspect is to encapsulate the complexity of a city and support accurate, cross-scale and in-time predictions based on the ubiquitous spatio-temporal data of high-volume, high-velocity and of high-variety. To address this challenge, MARVEL delivers a disruptive Edge-to-Fog-to-Cloud ubiquitous computing framework that enables multi-modal perception and intelligence for audio-visual scene recognition, event detection in a smart city environment. MARVEL aims to collect, analyse and data mine multi-modal audio-visual data streams of a Smart City and help decision makers to improve the quality of life and services to the citizens without violating ethical and privacy limits in an AI-responsible manner. This is achieved via: (i) fusing large scale distributed multi-modal audio-visual data in real-time; (ii) achieving fast time-to-insights; (iii) supporting automated decision making at all levels of the E2F2C stack; and iv) delivering a personalized federated learning approach, where joint multi modal representations and models are co-designed and improved continuously through privacy aware sharing of personalized fog and edge models of all interested parties.

InCUBE brings together 23 high-profile partners and two affiliated entities from 7 European countries, envisioning to unlock the EU renovation wave through cutting-edge standardized, lean integrated processes based on 4 key pillars of innovation: 1) Industrialization: Off-site manufactured solutions including the use of robots (e.g., demolition, telescopic cranes, drilling and waste sorting), so far applied only in industrial environments, offering novel services (e.g., anti-collision, area boundary, waste tracking); 2) Novel self-RES power producing and storage technologies, products and environmentally friendly materials (e.g. low GWP-refrigerant heat pumps); 3) Digitalization: Dynamic Digital Twins of both products and buildings, utilizing immersive capturing techniques (e.g., Laser 3D scanners and Drones), digitally merging innovative manufacturing processes with BIMs, and; 4) New market entrants, organized under novel business models, to allow for increased levels of collaboration and productivity. The InCUBE Suite, integrates digital tools across all 4 pillars, enables for seamless coordination of different renovation phases while leveraging data streaming from multiple interoperable sources to accommodate tenants’ comfort and render buildings active energy nodes in the synergetic energy networks paradigm of the future. Solutions will be validated in 3 large-scale demo sites (19,100 m2, >600 residents) in 3 countries (IT, ES, NL), including a cultural heritage building. Key expected outcomes include among others: Reduction of waste streams and time needed on-site by >35%, renovation cost reduction by >30%, reduction of working time with hazardous activities by >50%, energy savings >6GWh/y (78%), GHG reductions >1,980 tCO2eq/y, achieving an energy performance gap between as-built and as-designed 2,000 users; all while accounting for social inclusion, upskilling and enhancement of women’s role in the construction industry.