The Romanian Presidency of the EU Council in the first Semester of 2019 is an excellent opportunity to build, strengthen, promote and disseminate its strategic goals, which are in accordance with the EU policies and objectives. Positioned both in the lower part of the Danube Region and the Western Black Sea, Romania has been strategically interested in strengthening cooperation in both regions. The “Sustainable Development at the Black Sea” Conference under the auspices of the EU Council Presidency is an excellent opportunity for Romania as well as the whole EU to take major steps towards the development, approval and implementation of a Strategic Agenda in the Black Sea region. This will support and guide the way towards a knowledge-based society, where innovation and smart activities bring the sustainable social and economic growth in the entire Black Sea region. The conference will bring together all major categories of stakeholders with active and potential roles in building a sustainable and innovative society in the Black Sea region. Besides the research and academic communities, the Conference will bring together actors from all the Black Sea countries, supporting a smart connection between Europe and Asia, aiming to bring to life the “Silk Road” of the future. Decision and policy makers, academics, professionals, local communities, environmental NGOs, business persons will work together in five parallel sessions. The scope is to identify policy options and priorities, as well as plan future actions. Outcomes of the parallel sessions will be used to strengthen and support the “Bucharest Declaration” aimed to build a Sustainable and Innovative Society around the Black Sea. The Conference will thus be a landmark also on a process started by the EC in 2016, which has grouped DG R&I, DG MARE, the Eastern Partnership and a group of researchers in the Black Sea countries to develop a strategic plan to back the smart and sustainable growth in the region.

Time is running out to achieve a more sustainable development. Post COVID-19 economic stimuli need to deploy a green new deal (GND) that ReSETs economic systems to create secure and meaningful employment whilst protecting nature for people, for climate change and flood mitigation, temperature regulation, pollution prevention and soil and biodiversity conservation. This green new deal needs to harness safe, renewable technologies and nature-based solutions. A business as usual (BAU) post-COVID stimulus would embed employment, economic and environmental precarity in what is now fundamentally an unsustainable and unequitable model. RESET aims to leverage developments in spatial modelling, artificial intelligence and interoperable environmental sensing to better understand pathways to RESET agricultural and urban development across Europe for sustainability. For agriculture we will examine BAU versus an alternative trajectory of regenerative agriculture and rewilding. For cities we will examine BAU vs a more telecommuting focused trajectory of lowered densities, re-greening, traffic reduction to reduce (air, water, noise) pollution and improve the quality of urban life. In all cases we will examine impacts on employment, environment and economy. We focus on farmland and urban land uses as understudied environments and as key for sustainable development. We will build upon the success of our previous work in developing spatial policy support systems and accompanying user-led design processes, to further develop and integrate advanced environmental sensor networks with a focus on per-person individualised employment, economic and environmental outcomes of investments. This will require environmental and social intelligence to an unprecedented degree bringing together environmental modelling, advanced sensor research, social science and stakeholders’ engagement, and artificial intelligence to go way beyond conventional environmental impact assessment approaches.

THE MICS project brings together a transdisciplinary team to address a scientific and policy priority area where citizen science has the potential to promote a paradigm shift. Nature-based solutions (NBSs) are actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges and provide human well-being. NBSs have increasingly become policy and planning objectives, but major knowledge gaps in NBSs science have hindered their implementation and acceptance. This is largely due to a lack of locally specific information about the influence of: climate, location, condition and management on NBS function and impact. Furthermore, the sustainability of NBSs often depends on the perceptions and needs of stakeholders, including user groups, local communities, conservation bodies, farmers, land managers, policy makers and practitioners. Due to their systemic complexity and embedding in local context, NBSs offer a unique potential for citizen science to make a major contribution. The MICS project will support NBS research by developing strategies and tools to evaluate impacts on science and society resulting from the integration of citizen science. These tools will foster citizen science approaches that increase both scientific knowledge, and how scientific evidence is taken up by communities and policy makers. MICS will use novel impact-assessment metrics and instruments that measure costs and benefits of citizen science in relation to the NBSs, with particular attention in the domains of society; democracy; the economy; NBS science, and citizen scientists. These instruments will be grounded in a comprehensive conceptual framework and integrated into an open platform following rigorous validation in key pilot sites along a West-East EU axis. This will test the applicability of the MICS impact-assessment tools in regions with differing opportunities and constraints for NBSs, and with different levels of citizen science uptake.

Water quality is a key worldwide issue relevant to food production, industry, nature and recreation. Recognising its importance, Copernicus has satellite data and services to provide water quality data and information to end-users in industry, policy, monitoring agencies and science. However, water quality data production is split across three services, Copernicus Marine, Climate Change, and Land, with different methods used, while transitional waters are not supported by any service. CERTO will address these issues by undertaking R&D necessary to produce harmonised water quality data from each Copernicus service and extend support to the large communities operating in transitional waters. CERTO will focus on: methods to classify waters, using satellite observations, together with existing and new in situ data; improvements to remove the atmospheric signal, particularly problematic in near-coastal and transitional waters; and evaluating cross-cutting optical water quality Indicators, that may be used across coasts, transitional and inland waters (monitored through WFD and MSFD). The project will contribute to DANUBIUS the developing European research infrastructure in River-Sea Systems, GEO AquaWatch and Blue Planet, the Lagoons for Life initiative as well as supporting the United National Sustainable Development Goals. The main output of the project will be a prototype that can be “plugged into” the existing services, or the Copernicus DIAS, and widely used open-source software (SNAP). CERTO will also produce the evidence needed by the “entrusted entities” that run Copernicus services as to the improvements, potential to increase the user community, possible downstream services and wider impact of the prototype. CERTO will achieve it objectives by bringing uniquely together the leaders of the water quality data elements in the three Copernicus Services, 5 SMEs Climate-KIC, 4 research intensive institutes/and leaders of end-user relevant communities.