To objective of the BEACON project is to develop a commercial service package that will enable insurance companies to exploit the untapped market potential of Agricultural Insurance, taking advantage of innovations in Earth Observation, weather intelligence and ICT / blockchain technology. BEACON will enable insurance companies to alleviate the effect of weather uncertainty when estimating risk for Agricultural Insurance products, reduce the number of on-site visits for claim verification, reduce operational and administrative costs for monitoring of insured indexes and contract handling, and design more accurate and personalized contracts. Through an early warning service they will be able to inform their customers (farmers) for potential crop risks related with weather conditions, and advise them to take all the necessary actions to mitigate the impact of weather in their crops. EO data derived by Copernicus Sentinel missions as well as by missions contributing to Copernicus will be used to develop the data products that will act as a complementary source to the information used by insurance companies to design their products and assess natural disasters. Weather intelligence based on data assimilation, numerical weather prediction and ensemble seasonal forecasting will be used to verify the occurrence of a catastrophic weather event and to predict future perils. ICT / blockchain technology will be used for the smart contract service, to provide insurance companies with an automated method for paying out damages to insured parties. The BEACON services will be deployed in the operational environment of more than 10 companies in the insurance sector, openly demonstrating and validating its value proposition and acceptance as a marketable commercial solution. A business model will be developed and validated using the Lean Start-up methodology, and a global roll-out of BEACON will be designed.

Public administrations responsible for the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) need to monitor farmers’ compliance to standards. Monitoring is performed by in-field visits and through remote sensing. Due to the high complexity and diversity of the obligations that need to be monitored, both methods have limitations, and entail a high cost for public administrations. RECAP proposes a methodology for improving the efficiency and transparency of the compliance monitoring procedure through a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform which will make use of large volumes of publicly available data provided by satellite remote sensing, and user-generated data provided by farmers through mobile devices (geo-referenced and time-stamped photos). The RECAP platform will extract useful features from Earth Observation open data, correlate them with user-generated and geo-information data available to public organisations, and model this information for enabling the identification of potential breaches of compliance by public authorities and inspectors. RECAP will offer farmers a tool supporting them to comply with regulations imposed by the CAP, providing personalised information for simplifying the interpretation of complex regulations, and early alerts on potential breaches. RECAP will allow agricultural consultants and developers to create add-ons to the main application that extend its functionality and exploit the data collected through an Application Programming Interface (API), and a Software Development Kit (SDK). Consultants will be able to access data available in the platform, subject to security and privacy policies, and to develop their own services within the platform using design tools, libraries, and communication with the database under an open approach. The RECAP services will be tested and validated in an operational environment in 5 countries with the participation of public authorities, farmers, and agricultural consultants.

SiEUGreen aspires to enhance the EU-China cooperation in promoting urban agriculture for food security, resource efficiency and smart, resilient cities. Building on the model of zero-waste and circular economy, it will demonstrate how technological and societal innovation in urban agriculture can have a positive impact on society and economy, by applying novel resource-efficient agricultural techniques in urban and peri-urban areas, developing innovative approaches for social engagement and empowerment and investigating the economic, environmental and social benefits of urban agriculture. In order to achieve its objectives, SiEuGreen brings together a multi-disciplinary Consortium of European and Chinese researchers, technology providers, SMEs, financiers, local and regional authorities and citizen communities. The project consists in the preparation, deployment and evaluation of showcases in 5 selected European and Chinese urban and peri-urban areas: university in Norway, community gardens in Denmark, previously unused municipal areas with dense refugee population in Turkey, big urban community farms in Beijing and Central China. Throughout SiEUGreen’s implementation, EU and China will share technologies and experiences, thus contributing to the future developments of urban agriculture and urban resilience in both continents. The impact measurement during and especially beyond the project period is a key component in the project’s design. Information and results obtained from the project will be disseminated through diverse communication and dissemination tools including, social media, an innovative app enhancing urban co-design, stakeholder conferences, hand-on training workshops, showcase demonstration forums, municipality events. A sustainable business model allowing SiEUGreen to live beyond the project period is planned by joining forces of private investors, governmental policy makers, communities of citizens, academia and technology providers.

POP-MACHINA aims to demonstrate the power and potential of the maker movement and collaborative production for the EU circular economy. We draw from a number of cut-edge technologies (factory-of-the-future, blockchain) and disciplines (urban planning, architecture) to provide the support necessary to overcome scaling issues; a typical drawback of collaborative production; to find the areas more in need of our intervention and to reconfigure unused spaces. We put forth an elaborate community engagement program to network, incentivize and stimulate through maker faires and events existing and new maker communities in all our municipalities. We build upon the current informal curriculum for maker skills development by nurturing the social side and we put educators and makers together to exchange ideas on the training modalities. A particular focus on the skill development of women and vulnerable groups will aim to empower these (underrepresented) segments to partake actively in collaborative production. In every pilot area we will demonstrate business oriented collaborative production of feasible and sustainable concepts from secondary raw material or other sustainable inputs, based on the needs and preferences of the local stakeholders. A thorough impact assessment framework with increased scope (e.g. social) will be co-designed with stakeholders after short basic assessment trainings and will be used in the assessment of our pilot work. Based on the findings we will kick-start a series of policy events to discuss openly – without pushing our results – the tax and legal barriers that hamper collaborative production.

SIEUSOIL will design, implement and test a shared China-EU Web Observatory platform that will provide Open Linked Data to monitor status and threats of soil and assist in decision making for sustainable support of agro-ecosystem functions, in view of the projected climate change. The Observatory platform will through customizable modules support the wise management of soil at field level and will provide showcase of good practices on soil management both for EU and China. The final target will be to support sustainable management of soil, increase land productivity sustainably, reduce crop yield variability across time and space, and support the policy formulation process. Innovative practices and tools will be tested in SIEUSOIL and their impact will be assessed for improved soil fertility and land suitability.