With increased water scarcity due to anthropocentric and natural causes, the trade-offs and synergies intrinsic to efficiently allocate water resources to various competing uses have become more polarized. Realizing the importance of an integrated approach in water governance, the RETOUCH Nexus project introduces and promotes the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Nexus as a multi-level and cross-sectoral approach that advocates the EU water economy and, in addition, relies on ecological and social considerations. The overall objective of RETOUCH Nexus is to design and foster integrated, innovative and inclusive Nexus-smart water governance schemes and institutional settings to promote a secure water future in the EU, resilient to climate change. RETOUCH Nexus follows an evidence-based approach to propose, assess and optimize a set of WEFE Nexus smart methods in six different case studies reflecting various cross-sectoral, multi-level and multi-stakeholder water governance contexts. First, the project will monitor water governance by providing a set of Nexus-smart socio-economic and environmental indicators that reflect the cross-sectoral and multi-level nature of water use. Second, RETOUCH Nexus will design integrated and climate-resilient water governance practices that ensure sustainable water systems. It will also develop economic instruments and business models that support robust water management under cross-sectoral competition. Third, RETOUCH Nexus will foster more transparent, inclusive and innovative engagement mechanisms that empower stakeholder and citizen participation in water governance. Finally, RETOUCH Nexus aims to effectively increase the socio-economic and environmental resilience of water governance in Europe by upscaling and endorsing successful and sustainable Nexus-based water governance interventions that will be designed and validated throughout the duration of the project.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already part of our lives and is extensively entering the space sector to offer value-added Earth Observation (EO) products and services. Copernicus data and other georeferenced data sources are often highly heterogeneous, distributed and semantically fragmented. Large volumes of satellite data (images and associated metadata) are frequently coming to the Earth from Sentinel constellation, offering a basis for creating value-added products that go beyond the space sector. The analysis and data fusion of all streams of data need to take advantage of the existing DIAS and HPC infrastructures, as well as the Galileo-enabled mobile devices when required by the involved end users to deliver fully automated processes in decision support systems. CALLISTO project integrates Copernicus data, already indexed in DIAS platforms such as ONDA-DIAS, utilising High Performance Computing infrastructures for enhanced scalability when needed. Complementary distributed data sources involve Galileo positioning data, visual content from UAVs, Web and social media data linking them with open geospatial data, in-situ sensor data. On top of these data sources, AI methods are applied to extract meaningful knowledge such as concepts, changes, activities, events, 3D-models, videos and animations of the user community. AI methods are also executed at the edge, offering enhanced scalability and timely services. The analysis of the extracted knowledge is performed in a semantic way and the associated analytics are delivered to the end users in non-traditional interfaces, including Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixer Reality in general. Data fusion among several types of data sources is provided on-demand, based on the end user requirements. The AI methods are trained to offer new virtual and augmented reality applications to water utility operators, journalists for the media sector, EU agriculture and CAP policymakers, and security agencies.

PERIVALLON aims to provide an improved and comprehensive intelligence picture of organised environmental crime and develop effective and efficient tools and solutions for detecting and preventing such types of criminal activities and for assessing their environmental impact based on geospatial intelligence, remote sensing, scanning, online monitoring, analysis, correlation, risk assessment, and predictive analytics technologies, by leveraging the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fields of computer vision and multimodal analytics. As a result, enhanced investigation processes and methodologies will be derived through the capabilities provided by the developed tools and solutions, and the insights obtained though the proposed Environmental Crime Observatory. The capacity of end users (including Police Authorities and Border Guards) will also be improved and will enable them to tackle such criminal activities in an effective manner based on advanced tools and solutions and also on the innovative training curricula developed using physical and/or digital twins of relevant environmental crime scenarios. Moreover, improved international cooperation will be facilitated through improved data sharing enabled by blockchain technologies, while improved regulation shaping and tuning will be supported through relevant policy recommendations. PERIVALLON will be validated in field tests and demonstrations in four operational use cases. Extensive training, hands-on experience, joint exercises, and training material will boost the uptake of PERIVALLON tools and technologies. With a Consortium 5 Police and Border Guard Authorities, 3 authorities related to environmental protection, 6 Research/Academic institutions, 8 industry partners (including seven SMEs), one EU Agency, and one Foundation, PERIVALLON delivers a strong representation of the challenges, requirements and tools to meet its objectives.