In 2015, the ecological status of 75-90% of surface waters in NW Europe was reported to be less than good. Diffuse pollution with nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from agriculture, together with point sources of N and P pollution from wastewater plants and industry, are a major cause of this failure to achieve good ecological status. Climate change is likely to exacerbate the pollution risk. Clearly, there is a huge challenge to implement effective mitigation measures to reduce nutrient loadings to air and water to meet desired environmental targets against the background of a changing climate. The synergies and tradeoffs between management actions to mitigate climate change and those to mitigate N and P pollution need to be clarified to develop effective local, regional and national policies. Governance arrangements to implement and monitor the necessary actions need to be better integrated, requiring a consistent and coherent set of environmental indicators. The overall objective of NEW-HARMONICA is to assess and co-develop a harmonised systemic approach to prioritizing an effective suite of N and P pollution mitigation measures and indicators to meet local to regional environmental targets. To achieve this objective, an experienced NEW-HARMONICA consortium (4 partners from 3 countries) with complementary expertise, skills and networks will work on 4 N and P-polluted cross-border river basins in NW Europe. All partners are involved in an established NW Europe Policy-Science Working Group (PSWG) who together with local catchment stakeholders play a central role in NEW-HARMONICA. NEW-HARMONICA’s approach is based on a combination of technical assessments, including quantification of N and P flows and load-reduction targets in the study catchments, assessments of governance arrangements, and policy support for the co-development of harmonised environmental policies, based on a strong evidence base and interactions with the PSWG and local stakeholders.

ARinfuse targets education and training at Higher Education institutions (HEI) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the field of Geoinformatics, with special reference to management and operations of utility underground infrastructures, such as water, sewage, electricity, gas, fiber optics, etc.The project is supporting individuals in acquiring and developing basic skills and key competences within the field of Geoinformatics and utility infrastructure, in order to foster employability. This objective is addressed through the development of new learning modules where Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are merged with Geoinformatics and applied within the utility infrastructure sector. The project also address, to some extent, the VET priority of promoting work-based learning, by introducing case-based learning, where the industry partners specify the requirements based on the needs of the work places.In order to achieve the above objectives and bring about the desired impact ARinfuse partnership delivered the below concrete tangible results:1. Complete set of tailor made holistic educational and training material including 24 (6 of them new) lectures, videos and self-assessment exercises through a state of the art professional educational platform. Available here: https://arinfuse.moodle.school 2. Custom made AR software with trainers and trainee mode and a freely developed 2D & 3D data viewer. Available here: https://www.arinfuse.eu/software/ 3. Datasets and data creation techniques for demo purposes and a free sample data of Nicosia city, Cyprus to try the software https://www.arinfuse.eu/software/ All of the above have been disseminated to target audiences through 6 Multiplier events and 3 training actions receiving positive evaluations from the audience, while at the same time an active communication campaign had been running through the project website and partners’ individual channels. For more information please visit: https://www.arinfuse.eu/

The COMPAIR innovation project is designed to bolster citizens' capacity to monitor, understand, and change their environmental impact, both at a behavioural and policy level. It unlocks the power of the wider public, including people from lower-socio economic groups, to provide broad granular data around a central theme of air quality, complementing and improving the quality of official datasets and making new information useful for helping to meet environmental aims. The project will achieve its aim by empowering people using a Citizen Science Lab - with a special focus on women, young people, and hard-to-reach groups ? to provide the skills to co-design and undertake environmental scientific experiments around needs and challenges in their locality. By providing innovative, self-assembly, low-cost sensors, dynamic dashboards, and augmented reality tools for collecting, visualising and extracting actionable intelligence from data, anyone regardless of their background, can understand their impact on the environment and explore immediate actions to improve it. Beyond helping to mitigate bad environmental habits at an individual and community level, CS (Citizen Science) data will also be used to mutually enrich other public and private data sources in official city decision making platforms. Thereby helping to increase civic engagement and influence more effective long-term environmental policy. Piloted in the Region of Flanders and the major cities of Athens, Berlin and Sofia, communities, businesses, researchers and public administrations will, for the first time, adopt and benefit from a technology-enabled, collective approach to evidence gathering that fills gaps in existing data sources, and provides new routes to innovation. COMPAIR will raise awareness of, and provide a CS Lab Toolkit, to ensure CS is a trusted approach to tackling complex, systemic and environmental problems that require different perspectives.

The transport sector is a major contributor to environmental degradation, including air and noise pollution that have negative effects to ecosystems and human health. This is particularly critical in urban areas, where the confluence of transport emissions and high population density result in adverse health impacts and substantial economic burden. The upcoming changes in the transport sector will be critical to reach targets set by the EU Green Deal. The Zero Pollution Action plans are essential tools to reduce pollution at many different levels. Through co-creation with stakeholders Net4Cities will facilitate the realization of the zero-pollution vision by 2050. The backbone of Net4Cities is this transdisciplinary approach in which the consortium members will engage with the partner cities, including ports and airports, to jointly produce new knowledge, and ensure relevance, uptake, and maximize transferability and exploitation. During the project, air and noise pollution monitoring infrastructure will be advanced and expanded in 11 European cities, including transportation hubs such airports and ports, to conform with upcoming directives and provide data for health impact assessments. The activities are designed to have long-lasting impact through both mid-, and long-term pathways, providing a roadmap for greater uptake in European cities by offering tailored, transferrable, evidence-based support for implementing effective management strategies for reducing transport-related emissions. The main project results will be consolidated in the Net4Cities Studio which will provide (1) a web-based interface with real-time maps and information to raise awareness, and (2) a support tool for policy decisions that will provide guidance for operationalization and recommendations of solutions that consider innovative technologies such as dynamic traffic management systems and inclusion of nature-based solutions in overarching policy designs.

High-quality, safe, and sufficient drinking water is essential for life: we use it for drinking, food preparation and cleaning. Agriculture is the biggest source of pesticides and nitrate pollution in European fresh waters. The overarching objective of WATERPROTECT is to contribute to effective uptake and realisation of management practices and mitigation measures to protect drinking water resources. Therefore WATERPROTECT will create an integrative multi-actor participatory framework including innovative instruments that enable actors to monitor, to finance and to effectively implement management practices and measures for the protection of water sources. We propose seven case studies involving multiple actors in implementing good practices (land management, farming, product stewardship, point source pollution prevention) to ensure safe drinking water supply. The seven case studies cover different pedo-climatic conditions, different types of farming systems, different legal frameworks, larger and smaller water collection areas across the EU. In close cooperation with actors in the field in the case studies (farmers associations, local authorities, water producing companies, private water companies, consumer organisations) and other stakeholders (fertilizer and plant protection industry, environment agencies, nature conservation agencies, agricultural administrations) at local and EU level, WATERPROTECT will develop innovative water governance models investigating alternative pathways from focusing on the ‘costs of water treatment’ to ‘rewarding water quality delivering farming systems’. Water governance structures will be built upon cost-efficiency analysis related to mitigation and cost-benefit analysis for society, and will be supported by spatially explicit GIS analyses and predictive models that account for temporal and spatial scaling issues. The outcome will be improved participatory methods and public policy instruments to protect drinking water resources.