"<< Background >>A fair and sustainable society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy cannot be achieved without a workforce to support it. That is why it is necessary to prepare the workforce for the skills requirements inherent in green jobs and to ensure that industries and workplaces do not face a shortage of adequately skilled workers. The EU is the world’s leading producer of wine and, like any other agri-food industry, both contribute to climate change and is affected by climate change.Environmental competences are essential for the wineries workforce and surrounding society, in order to ensure a positive ecological footprint of the activities carried out in this farming sector. Upskilling is, therefore, necessary to reap the benefits of the aforementioned ecological strategy.The need for a competence framework that identifies the ""green"" knowledge, skills and aptitudes has already been claimed by the EC. The wine sector can not be left behind. And linked to the competencies to be identified, a wine sector competence-based training that enables the workers to acquire the competences is particularly necessary.<< Objectives >>The aim of 'Green Vineyards' project is to raise the knowledge, skills and aptitudes of workers in the wine sector, addressing the challenges of climate change. The project objectives are:a) To identify the environmental competences required by the workers to ensure a positive ecological footprint of the activities carried out. b) To identify common gaps in the workers' knowledge, attitudes and skills, to better address their training necessities.c) To provide personalised training for wineries sector staff, according to the identified skills gaps and making the required training available 24/7. d) To facilitate access to training, creating a friendly and accessible online learning environment for all workers of wine sector.e) To raise awareness of climate change impact in the key sector of wine production.f) To improve the climate literacy of rural communities. g) To disseminate the expected outcomes in order to transmit the created knowledge all over Europe, making the knowledge and technology transfer from the wine sector to other agri-food sectors as smooth as possible.<< Implementation >>“Green Vineyards” project will identify the key environmental competences needed in the wine sector workforce to achieve an immediate and positive impact on climate change. It will comprise the identification and analysis of knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to work in a sustainable economy. The project consortium will also identify the best practices in upskilling workers. All this identified knowledge will be put into practice through a course, that split into modules, will have two different approaches: a) the identification of existent open educational resources, and b) the creation of specific contents, to jointly create a repository of learning contents that will satisfy workers training necessities.To support the acquisition of the required skills, a self-assessment tool will be developed. It will permit the workers to identify the competences they lack and will suggest the most adequate training to acquire those competences, through personalized training itineraries.A Training platform will be specially built to collect all the course contents, facilitating open access to the modules, the escalation of both the courses and final users, and the sustainability of the overall approach.The learning scheme will be tested, piloted by approximately 300 participants, and subsequently improved.A certification tool will be put in place allowing final users to obtain evidence of the competence achieved, improving their competitiveness within the labor market.A transferability scheme will be put in practice to disseminate project results in all educative sectors, as well as other agri-food sectors and industries.<< Results >>In two years and half of intensive work, the project will produce the following tangible results:a) An environment-oriented Competence Framework, usable not only by the whole wine sector but transferable to many other sectors.b) A catalogue of best practices, interventions put into practice by sector stakeholders, such as wineries, trade unions or cooperatives to showcase how these organisations re-skill or upskill their workers to acquire environmental competences. c) Multimedia resources, based on the catalogue of selected practices. 5 ad hoc created videos will be produced. Td) A self-assessment and recommendation tool, showing workers which competences they lack and proposing the most appropriate training itinerary.e) A complete set of appropriate training materials, specifically tailored to acquire the identified competences.f) An online Learning Hub, a brand new multi-platform site, responsive, that will permit universal and free access to the contents, methodology and outcomes. This will allow the use of mobile devices daily, whenever, wherever. g) A transferability Toolkit. a step-by-step guide that will describe and plan the transfer of the Green Vineyards methodology and contents. The results will be openly licensed to allow the re-use and/or modification by third-party organisations.After having tested the learning scheme by 300 workers, the sector will get a specially created tool to improve its workforce capacities to participate in a more 'green' and sustainable economy, enhancing at the same time the overall society awareness about climate change."

Community energy sits high in the energy policy agenda as an inseparable part of the strategy towards a low-carbon EU economy. Sustainable biogas technologies have been extremely slow in catching up with community energy developments, failing to benefit from their undeniable potential. ISABEL aims to remove the obstacles and to promote community biogas in the EU by bringing out its societal relevance and by joining forces with a major revolutionary movement – Social Innovation. To achieve and sustain this transition, ISABEL employs modern marketing research to understand the needs and cultural diversities of the communities, fuses Social Innovation to reposition Biogas from an economic bio-fuel carrier to a social good, to come up with new community concepts and to build a stronger and wider community engagement in support of biogas. We zoom in on specific areas with diverse interest and we support communities on the ground to realize community biogas plans in coordination with all the stakeholders, slashing transaction overheads. We bring communities together to exchange and inspire each other as we carefully steer them towards quality sustainability and impact assessment principles. We zoom out to inform the policy world about what works and what does not, what should change and how we can scale-up, replicate and innovate in order to make investments more attractive. We envision a more innovative, better connected, less sensitive to policy and more transparent community biogas movement which will serve as a spring of ideas for other renewable energy technologies. But we start simple – we want more ideas, more and deeper public involvement, more responsible community biogas plans and more bold and fair policies; and we bring along a highly complementary team of practical minded people to do it.

The loss of biodiversity is one of the largest and most important challenges worldwide. The current rate of species extinction, due to human influences, is up to 1000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. Agriculture is the most important land use in Europe, with around 50% of the surface used for agricultural production. In the past, agriculture significantly contributed to increasing the diversity of landscapes and species in Europe. Today, intensive agriculture is one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss in the cultural landscape. Sound knowledge is available regarding food production and protection of biodiversity and ecosystems. But that knowledge is still not sufficiently considered and production methods not sufficiently adapted. One important reason for that is that biodiversity is still not enough considered in a farmer´s professional education or further training nor do they receive consulting directly on the farm. In addition, vine growers do not carry out systematic analyses of their impacts on biodiversity on their whole farm. The EU is a leading producer of wine. Spain, Portugal and Turkey belong to the top ten countries in Europe with the largest vineyards. The main target group of the project was the organic vine growers - farmers producing grapes in the vineyards - either for viticulture as for sultana production. As organic vine-growers work constantly on improving biodiversity in their fields, because vivid ecosystems and a high diversity in the soil and between vine rows are a prerequisite for healthy grapes and a good quality. However, the results are also interesting and applicable for conventional vine-growers. The project aimed at adapting vine-growing practices to protect, enhance and promote biodiversity in vineyards. This was achieved with a transfer of knowledge between the partners, to train each other and to develop high quality training materials for vine-growers. The training materials and the implementation of training courses contribute to specify the professional education of a vine-grower and to high quality VET. The partnership consisted of eight partners; of tandems between nature conservation organizations and farmer/wine grower associations in Germany, Spain and Portugal and of an organic agriculture company in Turkey. The partners are experienced in the topic of viticulture and/or biodiversity and while developing each output the exchange of those experiences and the training of each other was the first achievement. The training material support vine-growers to integrate biodiversity into their work. They consist of information materials where knowledge was made more accessible to vine-growers and of specific biodiversity training modules with a focus on systematic analyses of their impacts. All results are available in 5 languages: • Biodiversity Fact Sheet for vine-growers: explains biodiversity, shows links between viticulture and biodiversity and names best practices• Biodiversity Guide in viticulture: introduces on approx. 60 pages typical species in vineyards and gives some interesting facts. Icons were explicitly developed for that purpose indicates areas in the vineyards and measures to promote these species. • Educational videos: a number of videos introduce important measures for biodiversity in viticulture and outlines advantages of biodiversity for making good vines and sultanas. • Biodiversity Check: with this output, comprehensive individual training with external expertise is facilitated to assess potential negative impacts and give recommendations for improvement where necessary. • Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP): a catalogue of possible measures for all viticulture/grape growing relevant areas. It enables vine-growers to manage their biodiversity activities Due to the project, project partners could sharpen their profile in all aspects of biodiversity and viticulture and became national specialists in carrying out both biodiversity training modules. In addition all partner organizations implemented the outputs into their training programs and continue to work in this area. Vine-growers having already received individual trainings could specify their professional education and increase competitiveness. The outputs can be used in different scenarios: in training courses in agrarian schools/universities; advisors or technicians giving advice directly on the field or it can be used by the vine-growers directly. Due to this approach time expenditure for additional time-demanding schooling activities can be reduced. But vine growers still receive the needed knowledge to adapt production methods and to specify their professional education. Most of the outputs can be use directly or with the easy adaptations in other vine-growing regions or countries. The concept of the training materials can be used and adapted to other (agricultural) sectors. This already happened for example for banana production in Central America.

Realising an accelerated expansion of renewable energy will require a switch from centralised to decentralised energy production and greater social participation, together known as energy democracy. The increase in energy democracy and social equity will be an essential part of the clean energy transition. A transition that could represent one of the most fundamental social, economic and technical changes in modern history. The most common businesses associated with social innovation in the renewable energy sector are Cooperatives, Aggregators and Crowdfunding platforms. These businesses facilitate consumers to take a more active role in the electricity system. Achieving sustained growth in energy democracy requires a better understanding of support structures for successful social innovation across technical, legal and economic systems. SocialRES aims to devise more effective ways of increasing social innovation leading to greater social acceptability as well as more durable governance arrangements and socioeconomic benefits. Through research excellence and co-creation of knowledge with relevant stakeholders, SocialRES will develop socially innovative and inclusive strategies for the energy system of the future. SocialRES will supplement the existing fragmented data on social innovations with new understandings from businesses, end-users and stakeholders to provide a comprehensive evidence base for policy design. The project will employ innovative techniques such as a Peer to Peer (P2P) crowd-investing for renewable energy sources (RES) projects, P2P lending and P2P virtual RES energy aggregator platform. The SocialRES team combines partners from a range of disciplines together with industry expertise to develop a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and limitations of the current renewable energy system to foster social innovation and to shape a roadmap for a future, more innovative and equitable system.

Just Climate Resilience through Enhanced Adaptation and Capacity Harnessing (JustREACH) will advance just climate resilience by enhancing the capability of local and regional authorities, industries, and citizens to implement climate adaptation and smart specialization plans. By building on and connecting existing knowledge sharing platforms for local and regional authorities, the project aims to highlight overlapping opportunities in implementing local adaptation measures and meeting regional socio-economic policy objectives between climate adaptation and regional development. The project also empowers authorities to assess the impacts of adaptation and regional transformation measures with a focus on citizen well-being and awareness of maladaptation risks. JustREACH not only provides new tools but also equips authorities with the means to use them effectively within existing decision-making processes by working with pilot partners who themselves are decision-makers in their own regions. The training that will be developed as a result of JustREACH outputs and experiences will aim to strengthen the capacities of all local and regional authorities to identify and overcome barriers, and to co-design with and mobilize community leaders, businesses, and citizens to adopt and scale up context-specific initiatives. Most importantly, JustREACH helps authorities and citizens alike to overcome implementation goals while also linking these actions to their consequences for equity, ecosystem health, the just transition and social justice.