EULAC ENERGYTRAN intends to strengthen the cooperation between the European Union and Latin American and the Caribbean research infrastructures to tackle a common challenge: how to get a clean, sustainable and just energy transition. This project pursues its goal through the exchange, generation and transfer of knowledge among entities from a multidisciplinary approach (technological, environmental, social) and through the support to the development of public policies and regulatory frameworks towards climate neutrality. This general goal will be achieved by four specific goals that respond the multidisciplinary approach, in tune with the complexity of the energy transition. Therefore, the project supports technological R&I to overcome the existing limitations of renewable energies but acknowledging these developments may have an environmental and social impact which must be addressed. This proposal wants to come up with ideas about how to achieve an energy transition compatible with environment protection and social justice. Energy transition is at the top of the political agendas of both regions, EU and LAC, so this project may contribute to consolidating it as a priority area of interregional scientific cooperation. This project will be carried out by a heterogenous and interdisciplinary consortium composed of eleven partners with wide presence in the EU and LAC. They include ERICS and an international organization, among other entities, from different areas of knowledge. This way the complexity of the energy transition is better tackled. Under this scheme, EULAC ENERGYTRAN will create a network of an interconnected and sustainable EU and LAC research infrastructures that contributes to energy transition by technological, social and sustainably strengthening the performance of entities through shared knowledge and close interactions among researchers. This common effort will mean a step forward, in both regions, to reach a society that needs to be resilient.

Biodiversity Meets Data - BMD - is a Single Access Point that provides managers of natural resources and policy makers with access to high-throughput biodiversity monitoring tools and AI driven taxon identification services, services to mobilise historical baseline and legacy data to FAIR data repositories, a data catalogue to all available biodiversity information, a suite of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) for data analyses for the terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms, and a web-GIS data viewer to explore the data and VRE results. All data are harmonised across space-time-taxonomy and transformed into multi-dimensional data cubes that are analysed by the VREs. The VREs are co-designed with the stakeholder representatives to ensure that the VREs meet all requirements. The VREs include tools for a) biodiversity monitoring, b) identification and analysis of drivers of change, and c) projections of land cover and climate change on the distribution of species and habitats. The VRE results are presented as comprehensive products to the end users so that they can effectively be used to monitor biodiversity, address drivers of biodiversity loss, and plan, manage and expand protected areas, improve the conservation status of species and habitats, and comply to the reporting obligations under the EU nature directives based on up-to-date knowledge and solutions. BMD builds on a consortium of partners that are involved in the development of European research infrastructures and biodiversity monitoring projects, including eLTER (Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research), LifeWatch ERIC, MAMBO (Modern Approaches to the Monitoring of BiOdiversity), BGE (Biodiversity Genomics Europe), B3 (Biodiversity Building Blocks for Policy, GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), and ARISE (Authoritative and Rapid Identification System for Essential biodiversity information) among others.

Today, agricultural systems are facing multiple challenges, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling resources, degradation of soil and water quality. Agroecology can strengthen the sustainability and resilience of farming systems and thus contribute to addressing these challenges. Based on the premise that Open Innovation Arrangements (OIAs) and in particular Living Labs (LL) and Research Infrastructures (RIs) are instruments that have large potential to contribute to amplifying agroecology in Europe, the main aim of ALL-Ready (this project) is to prepare a framework for a future European network of LLs and RIs (to be called “AgroEcoLLNet”) that will enable the transition towards agroecology throughout Europe. It will rely on a highly participatory and inclusive approach and on experimentation in real life situations and thus itself uses a living lab approach. An underpinning principle of the project is strong stakeholder engagement, which has begun in the preparation of this proposal. The project has 3 phases: an initial preparatory phase in which the vision, scope and mission for the Network are defined and the criteria for inclusion in the Network of LLs and RIs as well as other forms of OIAs are defined. This will enable the mapping of current and emerging LLs, RIs and OIAs across Europe and their characteristics, highlighting best cases. In a second phase, different prerequisites/ activites for the future Network will be prepared ‘(sustainability, including funding, governance, capacity building, data and knowledge management). Plans for each of these will be constructed with stakeholders and then tested in a small-scale pilot network and then refined to match needs. Finally, the outcomes of the work will be communicated widely throughout Europe by a variety of mechanisms. One of the final outcomes of the project will be a pilot-tested Implementation Plan for implementing the validated framework of AgroEcoLLNet, within Horizon Europe.

PERMAGOV aims to contribute to the realization of the EU Green Deal objectives by improving implementation and performance of EU marine policies. PERMAGOV’s project objectives are: 1) co-developing and applying a Marine Governance Performance Assessment Framework to assess how institutional barriers, formal and informal collaborations and e-governance tools enable and constrain the capability of actors to implement EU marine policies within the areas of Marine Energy, Maritime Transport, Marine Life and Marine Litter; and 2) co-producing Multi-Layered Collaborative Marine e-Governance Strategies which enhance the capability of end-users to contribute to the implementation of EU marine policies related to the four marine issue areas to achieve the EU Green Deal goals. PERMAGOV will contribute to the improved performance of marine polices and a successful implementation of the EU Green Deal objectives, by an assessment of 9 cases (De-carbonizing shipping, Motorways of the Sea (Maritime Shipping), Seabed integrity, Sustainable fisheries in MPAs (Marine Life), Floating Wind, Energy island, Offshore Wind (Marine Energy), Marine litter (Baltic and Mediterranean Seas)(Marine Plastics)), focusing on the enabling and constraining conditions of institutional barriers and the possibilities for multi-layered collaborative and e-governance. Characteristics for PERMAGOV is co-production and co-creation from the start to the end of the project and beyond. Together with end-users and stakeholders from maritime industries, NGOs, researchers and policymakers the Performance Assessment Framework will be developed and applied, in co-production the cases will be assessed, innovative Governance Strategies will be developed and digital tools will be improved in order to overcome the barriers hampering the performance of marine policies and the successful implementation of the objectives of the European Green Deal.

BiCIKL is a proposal that will initiate and build a new European starting community of key research infrastructures, establishing open science practices in the domain of biodiversity through provision of access to data, associated tools and services at (1) each separate stage of, and (2) along the entire research cycle. BiCIKL will provide new methods and workflows for an integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, accessing and re-using of sub-article-level data (specimens, material citations, samples, sequences, taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables) extracted from literature. BiCIKL will provide for the first time access and tools for seamless linking and usage tracking of data along the line: specimens → sequences → species → analytics → publications → biodiversity knowledge graph → re-use.