The EU 2020 targets of the European Union and international commitments of the EU make it mandatory for the EU to reduce its environmental impact while at the same time to make its economy more productive and more competitive. One important pathway to achieve both objectives is making the European economy more circular, meaning that the use of non renewable material resources is reduced, while at the same time the European economy is further developed and more jobs are created. CIRCULAR IMPACTS aims to provide European policy makers with the knowledge to guide and foster the transition to a more circular economy by developing an overarching impact assessment of that transition and at the same time make the evidence base available for policy makers to develop impact assessment for their own specific policy proposals. As the circular economy is an ambition with a very wide and not precisely defined application area, CIRCULAR IMPACTS will start by defining the circular economy, identifying the most important application areas, understanding the policy needs of the area and developing a methodology for assessing the macroeconomic and societal impacts. It will then focus on assembling the available evidence for impact assessments and make this evidence base available for policy makers and the project itself with a web based search tool. This search tool will also help to make several relevant information collections funded by past EU research framework programs visible again, by connecting their evidence base to the circular economy agenda. The project will then collect missing information in case studies in order to understand the processes of the circular economy and the processes it might replace in more detail. To achieve that CIRCULAR IMPACTS has already assembled a Steering group of industry experts which will be able to provide the connections and the industry knowledge to the impact assessment.

In order to help society manage the impacts of climatic changes and find innovative climate risk management solutions, we propose the project INNOVA: Innovation for Climate Services Provision. The primary objectives of INNOVA are: 1) the co-development of innovative solutions to transform climate risks into opportunities actively engaging a variety of stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, companies, public bodies, experts, and other talented professionals; and 2) the identification of measures for evaluating and monitoring, up-scaling, and replicating efficient current and future innovative climate services for decision making on managing climate risks taking into account their added value. The project aims to consolidate knowledge from leading earlier and on-going European initiatives and to distil specific complementary climate services essential for the enhancement and adoption of innovative solutions to support climate risk management. The project follows the broad definition of the European Roadmap for Climate Services going beyond simple descriptive analyses of climate risk management efforts supported by climate data on observations and projections and will provide prototypes including viable business models and practical innovation frameworks, and recommendations for creating and up-scaling opportunities through adaptive co-management approaches. Speeding up social and technological actions for climate risk management and generating opportunities are fundamental for solving the Europe’s societal challenge of climate change.