ImAFUSA focuses on quantifying a variety of understudied factors influencing societal acceptance of UAM in urban, peri-urban and inter-urban areas, especially when these are deployed using U3 and U4 services. We aim to deliver an “Impact and capacity Assessment Framework for U-space Societal Acceptance” (ImAFUSA) to assist Local Authorities and other U-space stakeholders and users with the delivery of socially acceptable and beneficial UAM deployment in cities. The framework and its tools will provide insights in 3 major areas influencing societal acceptance: environmental impact (including noise, visual pollution and air quality), safety and socioeconomic impact (including affordability, accessibility, economic development, public space use and connectivity). In each area, innovative performance indicators will be described while mathematical formulas and algorithms will be developed to quantify them. Data on citizen noise perceptions, perceptions on visual pollution, safety perceptions and overall UAM acceptance will be collected during 3 immersive citizen experiences of UAM applications in the city of Athens, Greece. The usability of the developed indicators will be tested in a simulation environment simulating real future use cases with a varying volume and configuration of movements in U-space. Through the collaboration of the Partners and the Advisory Board, ImAFUSA facilitates the flow and co-creation of knowledge and 10 innovative tools between higher education (HEI), innovative SMEs, Local Authorities and National Aviation Authorities. ImAFUSA´s developments benefit a variety of stakeholders including Local Authorities, policy-makers, U-space service providers, ATM/UTM planners and operators, drone manufacturers, environmental agencies and citizens above all.

BIN2BEAN will support cities in their transition towards regenerative soil systems by promoting innovations for soil improvement from bio-waste with a value-based approach. The project will implement 3 Living Labs, as pilot city-regions, to follow a multi-actor and participative approach. In each LL, after mapping local contexts in terms of material and monetary flows, a tailored evaluation framework to demonstrate the safety, environmental and socio-economic performance of soil improvers will be co-designed and implemented, through field testing on experimental sites, feasibility studies and choice experiments. The data obtained will feed into a pilot scoring system, that will be co-developed and validated during the project, to help cities selecting the most effective solutions adapted to the geo-spatial context, i.e. inner city, urban-rural fringe and the wider market. The highest scored solutions will be selected for the development of innovative and tailored business models. The latter will match to stakeholders’ willingness-to-adopt (circular) implementation packages, e.g. collection schemes, cooperation networks, infrastructures and fee structures. The pre-market processes will be monitored through Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA). Finally, based on all previous results, local, national and EU policy roadmaps will be drafted, including waste charging policies and citizen awareness campaigns in the city-region, that will be piloted in LLs. All this will feed into a PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) approach, enabling cities to create a continuous value-based improvement loop towards regenerative soil systems. BIN2BEAN will support local waste management with the creation of 40 start-ups specialising in the soil improvers value chains. This will help to reach Europe's 2035 objectives of reducing landfill to 10% of total waste while reinjecting nearly 135,000 tonnes of nitrogen and 45,000 tonnes of phosphorus into soils in an environmental, human and sustainable way.

There is a lack of data, understanding and awareness in Europe and in the world of compound weather and climate extremes. Insufficient governance function also affect the related vulnerability, risk and resilience of people, communities and places. The C2IMPRESS project aims to bring a radical paradigm shift to disaster and hazard research and innovation by moving away from traditional ‘hazard centric’ approach/ framework to a novel ‘place and people’ centred integrated multi-hazard risk and resilient assessment framework. Guided by this framework, the C2IMPRESS project aims to offer an ensemble of innovative revolutionary models, methods, frameworks, tools and technologies that are holistic and robust enough to provide appropriate fine-grained spatio-temporal qualitative and quantitative data, locally appropriate solutions, better prediction with lower uncertainty on risks of single or multiple hazards stemming from extreme weather events like floods, wildfires etc. under different climate change scenarios. Breakthrough innovations from C2IMPRESS project will be System-of-Systems for Multi-Hazard Risk Intelligence Network (SoS4MHRIN) platform (supported by the robust Earth System Dynamic Intelligence (ESDI) and Information Physical Artificial Intelligence (IPAI)), innovative Agent Based Model, polycentric risk governance, multi-actor decision support microservices and a suite of citizen engagement technologies and tools as well as novel co-design and co-creation approach for socio-technical innovations, knowledge production and validation to empower citizens and society with climate actions for a sustainable transition to a just risk resilient society. With these social and technical innovations -as novel processes and products- the C2IMPRESS project will provide better understanding and public awareness on multi-hazard risks, the associated multidimensional impacts, vulnerabilities and resilience of extreme weather events in 4 case study areas in Europe.

Cryptographic technologies and encrypted channel communications have become a standard security pre-requisite among government and industry protocols, schemes and infrastructure. Practical quantum computing, when available to cyber adversaries, will break the security of nearly all modern public-key cryptographic systems. Practical quantum computing, when available to cyber adversaries, will break the security of nearly all modern public-key cryptographic systems. Consequently, all secret symmetric keys and private asymmetric keys that are now protected using current public-key algorithms, as well as the information protected under those keys, will be subject to exposure. This includes all recorded communications and other stored information protected by those public-key algorithms, the so-called Harvest Now Decrypt Later (HNDL) paradigm. Any information still considered to be private or otherwise sensitive will be vulnerable to exposure and undetected modification. Once exploitation of Shor’s algorithm becomes practical, protecting stored keys and data will require re-encrypting them with a quantum-resistant algorithm and deleting or physically securing “old” copies (e.g., backups). Integrity and sources of information will become unreliable unless they are processed or encapsulated (e.g., re-signed or timestamped) using a mechanism that is not vulnerable to quantum computing-based attacks. PQ-NEXT will focus on developing a comprehensive framework to facilitate the seamless transition to post-quantum cryptographic standards. This includes creating a catalog of PQC algorithms, maintenance tools, and a quantum programming language with advanced features like high-performance simulation and hybrid quantum-classical optimization, ensuring crypto-agility and security against quantum threats for large-scale pilots, targeting the financial, critical infrastructure, digital identities and telco industries.

Adaptation to climate change has become a central focus for researchers across various fields, including climate science, environmental science, urban planning, information science and social science, to support policymakers in making informed decisions to build a climate-prepared and resilient society. The major challenges in achieving this goal are (i) lack of seamless interaction between platforms, data spaces, and users, (ii) poor data interoperability as well as service interoperability, (iii) lack of infrastructural support for generating FAIR data, and (iv) legal barriers hindering access to data. CLIMATE-ADAPT4EOSC aims to overcome these challenges by providing an EOSC-centred collaborative research environment equipped with existing EOSC data and services and extended with new data and services, such as Interoperability, FAIRification, Research Results Publishing as Open Data, Data Adaptation, Data Format Compliancy, Mapping and Entity Matching, enabling interoperability and seamless interaction of data that allow the creation of extended services, e.g., Big Data Analytics for climate risk assessments. The project develops a climate change adaption ontology and an EOSC Climate-Adapt Knowledge Graph based on the ontology, supporting findability, accessibility, tracking and life cycle management of research outputs of various kinds, including data, scientific papers, methods, code, software packages and tools. CLIMATE-ADAPT4EOSC also develops three innovative services that provides support to EU Mission climate change adaptation and the European Green Deal. These services have been planned to be demonstrated in Five EU countries.