The construction sector is responsible for 40% of CO2 emissions, 50% of all extracted materials, and 35% of waste generated. TIMBERHAUS will contribute significantly to decreasing these numbers and reaching Europe’s climate policy targets by developing innovative circular solutions for sustainable wood construction. TIMBERHAUS will use the considerable expertise and innovation power of the multi-actor consortium consisting of key stakeholders across the value chain to realise the full circular and sustainable potential of wood construction. Game changing wood processing technologies based on machine learning and artificial intelligence will be developed and used in the prototyping of innovative wood construction products incorporating currently underutilized wood resources and post-consumer wood. Supporting the New European Bauhaus, holistic and circular wood building blueprints for multi-story buildings incorporating local cultural traditions and design languages as well as human health and well-being aspects will be co-created and demonstrated as digital pilots together with European cities and their stakeholders. New knowledge on the quantitative limits and opportunities of wood as a resource will be generated to give valuable input to forest and climate policy development. To support the European Commission’s framework for carbon removal certification, TIMBERHAUS will develop a robust and cost-efficient methodology to quantify the carbon removal benefits of wood construction products and other materials. A European observatory for wood construction will be established to provide best practise guidelines and monitor statistics and market uptake. Localised and EU-level decarbonisation strategies for buildings will be developed along with roadmaps for mainstreaming multi-story wood buildings. Based on project learnings, policy recommendations will be provided along with recommendations for new or updated European harmonised technical specifications and Eurocodes.

Europe gave birth to the industrial revolution about two centuries ago thanks to the convergence of a series of factors that allowed technology to be closer to society, while creating economic benefits to regional and national economies. With the globalisation, European cities lost a large volume of manufacturing capacity and transitioned to a knowledge economy. The result: a decrease in manufacturing jobs, the lack appreciation for these jobs, and neglected industrial areas subject to decay. Decay of industrial heritage has a major imprint on European city's identities, but also is a source of opportunity. The result, industrial areas with high historical value for Europe being abandoned or exploited by extractive economic activities, with no connection to local knowledge, and with no generation of value at the local level. CENTRINNO aims to develop and demonstrate strategies, approaches and solutions for regeneration of industrial historic sites and areas as creative production and manufacturing hubs, that 1) hold true to the ecological challenges of our time, 2) boost a diverse, inclusive and innovative urban economy, and 3) and use heritage as a catalizer for innovation and social inclusion. We give centre stage to craftsmen, vocationally trained professionals, entrepreneurs, makers, SME’s, Fab Labs, Food Labs and Makerpaces to become key players in the cities supply of local goods and support them to take on a fundamental role in our future cities, thus opposing disengagement and stagnation of local economies. Through a holistic method combining the Fab City Global Initiative approach to productive cities with Emotion Networking, life cycle assessment and spatially-specific material flow analyses, we bring to the fore both complex, layered histories of these sites as well as the cities available resources in terms of urban landscape, materials, current day skills and practice and human capital.

The European Commission’s Mission for “100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” (“the Cities Mission”) seeks to accelerate Europe’s climate action commitments as part of the European Green Deal, whose ambition is to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The Cities Mission’s central tenet is to elevate and deepen the commitment to pursue systemic change through research and innovation, setting an ambition for cities of unprecedented scope and scale. In order to achieve such effects, a demand-driven Mission Platform has been established to provide tailored assistance and services to participating cities and those learning from them. As a part of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme, Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Green Deal call, the “LC-GD- 1-2-2020: Towards Climate-Neutral and Socially Innovative Cities” topic selected the four-year project NetZeroCities to establish the Mission Platform, which began work at the same time as the formal establishment of the Cities Mission, in October 2021. The scope of work presented herein will comprise the second Specific Grant Agreement (SGA2-NZC) development under the Framework Partnership Agreement FPA-NZC for the Mission Platform to scale and continue operations through 2027. Activities primarily focus on two objectives: the first to reinforce the support received by cities selected to participate in the Mission on financing their roadmap of activities towards climate neutrality, and the second to develop basic Mission Platform services for cities who are willing to commit to climate neutrality on a longer timescale than the Cities Mission.

Diversity of European cities and regions creates barriers to the demonstration of systemic food-related innovative approaches valuable in so different contexts. Objective of FoodE is to accelerate the growth of citizen-led City/Region food systems (CRFS) by bringing local initiatives across Europe together, as well as co-developing and disseminating a range of tools - co-designed with academia, citizens, and food system start-ups - to ensure that the most up-to-date cross-sectorial knowledge is applied. Start-ups will also provide an in-depth understanding of the needs of the key stakeholders, making resilient citizen-driven food systems happen. The key challenge is then to aggregate the most sustainable models of CRFS and enable co-creation of innovative pilot experiences, fostering the health and wellbeing of European citizens. This challenge will be tackled by setting a co-created mechanism, based on Citizen Science and Responsible Research and Innovation principles, where public authorities, citizens, business actors and non-profit organisations share ideas, tools, best practices and new models, supporting cities in becoming innovative food hubs. The outputs of FoodE will impact on job creation, promotion of local economy, strengthening the role of local communities in complying with Sustainable Development Goals, as well as identifying and strengthening relations between the different actors of the food chain. The way used by FoodE to achieve this goals consists of the following steps: - Define an operational methodology for the assessment of CRFS. - Promote cross-pollination between European CRFS. - Contribute to increase access to affordable, safe and nutritious food. - Create a tool mobilising CRFS stakeholders in sustainability assessment. - Upscale the output to other EU cities.

NetZeroCities (NZC) is designed to pursue the ambition of the report from the Mission Board for Climate Neutral and Smart Cities, as part of a broader European ambition to achieve climate neutrality before 2050. This ambition represents a substantial elevation of the degrees of decarbonisation and the timescale for achieving it. For all cities achieving this level of impact is an extraordinary undertaking and would require profound changes in how policies, projects and programmes are advanced by cities, with the direction and support of senior governments. NZC connects and builds beyond established programmes and experimental initiatives. The NetZeroCities consortium is build based on partners? expertise, experience, and access to a very large network of cities of all sizes and maturity throughout Europe. It has an excellent balance of partner typologies, a great geographical coverage allowing presence and activity all throughout Europe, and thanks to that, its approach goes beyond current state-of-the-art. NetZeroCities will create a programme tailored to the specific conditions of each city. All the services and thematic expertise will be aggregated and co-designed through a NZC one-stop-shop Platform and the digital portal and smart repository for impact measurement, capacity building and knowledge/tools dissemination. Cities will benefit from an intensive support relationship of dedicated City Guides to navigate the platform and ensure city needs are adequately understood and addressed. NetZeroCities will support pilots in 30 European cities and, in subsequent rounds of engagement, more than 100 cities to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 (medium-term) and 2050 (long term) respectively, by developing and deploying an integral approach to support climate-neutral transformation in cities. This will be achieved through the co-design and organisation of services, including the Climate-neutral City Contract as an enabling instrument.