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The EcoScope project will develop an interoperable platform and a robust decision-making toolbox, available through a single public portal, to promote an efficient, ecosystem-based fisheries management. It will be guided by policy makers and scientific advisory bodies, and address ecosystem degradation and the anthropogenic impact that are causing fisheries to be unsustainably exploited across European Seas. The EcoScope Platform will organise and homogenise climatic, oceanographic, biogeochemical, biological and fisheries datasets for European Seas to a common standard type and format that will be available through interactive mapping layers. The EcoScope Toolbox, a scoring system based on assessments of all ecosystem components, ecosystem and economic models, will operate as a decision-support tool for examining fisheries management and marine policy scenarios and spatial planning simulations. Groups of end-users and stakeholders will be involved in the design, development and operation of both the platform and the toolbox. Novel assessment methods for data-poor fisheries, including non-commercial species, as well as for biodiversity and the conservation status of protected megafauna, will be used to assess the status of all ecosystem components across European Seas and test new technologies for evaluating the environmental, anthropogenic and climatic impact on ecosystems and fisheries. A series of sophisticated capacity building tools (online courses, webinars and games) will be available to stakeholders through the EcoScope Academy. The EcoScope project will provide an effective toolbox to decision makers and end-users that will be adaptive to their capacity, needs and data availability. The toolbox will incorporate methods for dealing with uncertainty; thus, it will promote efficient, holistic, sustainable, ecosystem-based fisheries management that will aid towards restoring fisheries sustainability and ensuring balance between food security and healthy seas.

Recent literature has underlined the interplay among climate mitigation, adaptation, and finance, as well as between climate action and other development agendas, including sustainable resource use, human development and equity, and environmental pressures. Such an interconnected policy environment requires an integrated ecosystem of disciplines, methods, and tools. Despite the significant evolution of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in the last decade, there remain several criticisms on their design, use, and adequacy to respond to unaddressed and emerging questions in the light of the Paris Agreement and net-zero ambition. These include openness, legitimacy, and ownership, as well as technical feasibility to represent demand-side and broader societal transformations, cross-sectoral interactions, physical impacts and adaptation, climate finance and labour dynamics, and other sustainability goals. DIAMOND will update, upgrade, and fully open six IAMs that are emblematic in scientific and policy processes, improving their sectoral and technological detail, spatiotemporal resolution, and geographic granularity. It will further enhance modelling capacity to assess the feasibility and desirability of Paris-compliant mitigation pathways, their interplay with adaptation, circular economy, and other SDGs, their distributional and equity effects, and their resilience to extremes, as well as robust risk management and investment strategies. This will be done via integration of tools and insights from psychology, finance research, behavioural and labour economics, operational research, and physical science. We will develop a transdisciplinary scientific approach to legitimise the implementation process and co-create research questions that stretch the frontiers of climate science, as well as establish vibrant communities of practice to transparently open model enhancements and to develop capacities, thereby lowering the entrance barriers to the established IAM community.

Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology to medicine and healthcare. The field takes advantage of the physical, chemical and biological properties of materials at the nanometer scale to be used for a better understanding of the biological mechanisms of diseases at the molecular level, leading to new targets for earlier and more precise diagnostics and therapeutics. Nanomedicine, rated among the six most promising Key Enabling Technologies, is one of the most important emerging areas of health research expected to contribute to one of the strategic challenges that Europe has to face in the future: Provide effective and affordable health care and assure the wellbeing of an increasingly aged population. EuroNanoMed III (ENM III) builds on the foundations of ENM I & II, which launched 7 successful joint calls for proposals since 2009, funded 51 transnational research projects involving 269 partners from 25 countries/regions, and allocated € 45,5 million to research projects from ENM funding agencies. ENM III consortium, reinforced with 12 new partners from Europe, Canada and Taiwan, is committed to fostering the competiveness of European nanomedicine actors taking into account recent changes in the landscape and new stakeholders and challenges, as identified in the SRIA in nanomedicine. The first joint call for proposals will be co-funded by ENM III partners and the EC. After the co-funded call, three additional joint transnational calls will be organized and strategic activities will be accomplished in collaboration with key initiatives in the field. ENM III actions focus on translatability of project results to clinical and industry needs.

M-ERA.NET 3 aims at coordinating the research efforts in the participating EU Member States, Regions, and Associated States in materials research and innovation, including materials for future batteries, to support the circular economy and Sustainable Development Goals. A large network of national and regional funding organisations from 25 EU Members States, 4 Associated States and 6 countries outside Europe will implement a series of annual joint calls to fund excellent innovative transnational RTD cooperation, including one call for proposals with EU co-funding and additional non-cofunded calls. Continuing the activities started under the predecessor project M-ERA.NET 2 (3/2016-2/2021), the M-ERA.NET 3 consortium will address emerging technologies and related applications areas, such as - for example- surfaces, coatings, composites, additive manufacturing or integrated materials modelling. Research on materials supporting the large scale research initiative on future battery technologies will be particularly highlighted as a main target of the cofunded call (Call 2021) with a view to supporting in particular SDG 7 (“Affordable and clean energy”) by enabling electro mobility through sustainable energy storage technology and SDG 9 (“Industrial innovation and infrastructure”) by enhancing scientific research and upgrading the technological capabilities of industrial sectors. Several relevant action plans and initiatives will serve as programmatic guides for M-ERA.NET 3 when defining the joint activities, such as the Circular Economy Action Plan, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the EC communication “A clean planet for all”, and the “European Green Deal”. The total mobilised public call budget is expected to reach 150 million € with additional private investment of 50 million €. Thus, the leverage effect of the EU contribution will reach a factor of 13, exceeding by far the minimum required factor of 5.

The ECC-SMART is oriented towards assessing the feasibility and identification of safety features of an intrinsically and passively safe small modular reactor cooled by supercritical water (SCW-SMR), taking into account specific knowledge gaps related to the future licensing process and implementation of this technology. The main objectives of the project are to define the design requirements for the future SCW-SMR technology, to develop the pre-licensing study and guidelines for the demonstration of the safety in the further development stages of the SCW-SMR concept including the methodologies and tools to be used and to identify the key obstacles for the future SMR licencing and propose a strategy for this process. To reach these objectives, specific technical knowledge gaps were defined and will be assessed to achieve the future smooth licensing and implementation of the SCW-SMR technology (especially the behaviour of materials in the SCW environment and irradiation, validation of the codes and design of the reactor core will be developed, evaluated by simulations and experimentally validated). The ECC-SMART project consortium consists of EU, Canadian and Chinese partners to use the trans-continental synergy and knowledge developed separately by each partner. The project consortium and project scope were created according to the joint research activities under the International Atomic Energy Agency, Generation-IV International Forum umbrella and as much data as possible will be taken from the already performed projects. This project brings together the best scientific teams working in the field of SCWR using the best facilities and methods worldwide, to fulfil the common vision of building an SCW-SMR in the near future.

The InDeV project addresses the second bullet point of the topic MG.3.4. i.e. “… in-depth understanding of road accident causation…”. The main objective of the project is to develop a tool-box for in-depth analysis of accident causation for Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) based on a combined use of accident databases, in-depth accident investigations, surrogate safety indicators, self-reported accidents and naturalistic behavioural data. The tool-box will help to link accident causation factors to VRUs’ accident risk, and provide a solid basis for developing preventive countermeasures and a better input for socio-economic cost calculations of VRU accidents. The proposed approach is to reveal the causational factors by focusing on the process of accident development, thus overcoming the main weakness of the traditional accident data based approach that might find correlations between various factors and accident frequency, but not show the causation chains. It will also employ, to a larger extent, observation of critical traffic events that are similar in process to real accidents, but are relatively more frequent and easier to collect in sufficient quantities. The InDeV project includes the following steps: i) review of methods and identification of the critical sites and road user groups; ii) observation studies at the selected sites; iii) development of technical tools for automated behaviour data collection; iv) analysis of the socio-economical costs; v) compilation of the project results and development of the safety analyst tool-box. The project has a clear focus on VRUs and the course of events in accidents they get injured in. It will provide solid knowledge, help to avoid a skewed view on the problem of VRUs’ safety, and facilitate the proposed tailor-made countermeasures for these groups. Moreover, with the use of surrogate safety indicators, there will be no need to wait for accidents to happen in order to learn how to prevent them from happening.