"<< Background >>Environmental sustainability is today’s most acute challenge. The European Commission’s Zero Pollution Action Plan 2021 declares that “the public health, environmental, moral and socio-economic case for the EU to lead the global fight against pollution is today stronger than ever”. As human behaviour is largely responsible for the environmental crisis we are facing, creating conditions in which governments, organisations and individuals are inclined to make eco-friendly and sustainable choices will be highly instrumental in the crisis mitigation. The European Commission has identified it as one of “the most effective ways forward” in order to achieve its “Zero Pollution Vision for 2050: a Healthy Planet for All”. Promoting social behaviour change also features in the five priorities of the Education for Climate Coalition, a flagship initiative of the European Education Area. In the meantime, right in front of our eyes, Blockchain and an array of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have launched a revolution in the way governments, organisations, and individuals work together. At its heart, Blockchain is a database distributed among different computer servers, keeping a log of records cryptographically protected and organised in blocks of transactions, with no need of a third-party authentication. DLT and ‘Blockchain’, which is one type of DLT, allow immutable, transparent, traceable records of data. It provides a simple, secure way to establish trust for virtually any kind of transaction worldwide. The irrefutable aspect of DLT provides a new approach for promoting accountability of government, organisational and individual activities. Therefore, DLT’s potential to induce behaviour change is enormous. While the revolutionary potential of DLT has been largely tested in the financial domain, its possible use to address sustainability challenges have been explored far less. Application of DLT for environmental monitoring projects is in this regard very promising: water and air pollution levels can be monitored and recorded in an immutable manner, making falsification impossible. Giving citizens open access to trustworthy data can be conducive to their own personal accountability, empowering them to participate in environmental justice or ‘zero pollution pledges’. But to produce significant impact, DLT applications need to be designed with a knowledge of what drives human decision-making. To discover more ways DLT can contribute to improved accountability for actions and to unlock the transformative power of this technology for environmental good, non-technical issues need to be addressed. Higher education institutions play an important role in preparing the next generation of Computer Science engineers capable of tackling societal issues through breakthrough technologies. However, most EU universities lag behind when it comes to teaching DLT in combination with necessary non-technical skills to Computer Science students. Existing numerous online and offline courses on Blockchain cover the technical, financial, legal aspects of the technology but very few teach how to leverage it with the aim of tackling environmental problems. As Dr. Massarotto from UCL notices: “Educational materials are often superficial or overly-technical making their understanding of how blockchains will impact in the near future a challenge”. Future professionals will need to tackle strategic questions that DLT raises, and this will require critical, creative thinking skills, the understanding of complex, decentralized systems, the ability to design social behaviour, as well as to work in interdisciplinary teams. Currently, students still struggle with the distributed approach typical for DLT, as they are trained to deal with centralised systems. Moreover, Computer Science students lack the tools that would allow them to make a step from technical knowledge to identifying and solving certain environmental issues.<< Objectives >>The overall objective of the project is to build European higher education capacity in teaching DLT in combination with Environmental Engineering, Design Thinking, Behavioural Psychology/Behavioural Economics to Computer Science students at the Master level, in order to enable them to develop decentralised applications addressing the issue of environmental sustainability on a strategic level - aiming at a wide-spread social change. In order to achieve this objective, it is necessary to equip the next generation of professionals in Computer Science and beyond (environmental engineers, green NGO activists, designers of products & services, designers of smart cities & Industry 4.0, etc.) with the ability to develop solutions with a ‘decentralised’ and ‘green’ mindset. Creating a novel pedagogical framework that would allow developing such a mindset in students through the teaching/learning process is one of the project goals. The project team also aims at producing an innovative curriculum and a set of digital OERs that could be validated and used oncampus, online or in a hybrid setting not only by the members of the consortium but by dozens of universities Europe-wide.Another goal is to take full advantage of digital social interaction tools and set up a decentralised network of communities and supportive tools for connecting Computer Science students to the wider communities (DLT experts, environmental activists, behaviour economists, service designers), that can offer teachers and students learning and project development support in the context of the extremely interdisciplinary curriculum that we propose to create. In line with the decentralised logic that this resource will have, breaking down barriers between professional communities and allowing peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge will help to increase the quality of the learning outcomes and bring ‘green’ DLT-based projects to fruition by multidisciplinary self-organised teams.<< Implementation >>All BC4ECO activities have been designed and planned with the project objectives in mind. The partnership will organise seven transnational project meetings that will be instrumental to the project management and to the production of project results, as the meetings will allow partners to plan their teamwork and reflect on the progress. The work on the project results will be mostly happening between the face-to-face project meetings via digital tools for online collaboration and communication. However, the first transnational meeting will include an internal Ideation Workshop, where a co-creation process drawing from diverse fields of expertise will lead to the first draft of the BC4ECO novel pedagogical framework, aimed at instilling ‘decentralised’ and ‘green’ mindsets in students through the teaching/learning process.Organisation of three oncampus teaching and training events - two Summer Schools and one Teacher Training Workshop - will greatly contribute to the validation of the BC4ECO pedagogical framework, the course and the open educational resources. The Summer Schools will be organised in order to pilot the two educational modules with students and collect their feedback. Lecturers and researchers will learn from each other while observing peers giving classes during the Summer Schools. The Teacher Training Workshop will target the teachers from the partner institutions and beyond - all those interested in adopting our pedagogical methodology, replicating the course, or integrating BC4ECO OERs into their existing curricula. The Workshop will help teachers to become practically fluent in using distributed ledger technology in combination with associated methods, and to cultivate students with the ‘green’ and ‘decentralised’ mindsets. Feedback collected from the participants of the teacher training event will inform the further improvement of the project results.The partners will organise seven multiplier events, which are necessary for both dissemination of the results and stakeholder engagement. Important external experts and other stakeholders will be invited as participants to these events, their feedback on the project results will be collected and analysed. This will help to ensure the quality of the results. The multiplier events are also aimed at promoting the exploitation of the project results as widely as possible for a greater impact on the European higher education system. To maximise the target audience outreach, partners will co-locate five multiplier events with relevant national or international conferences, such as EUA Teaching and Learning Forum, Blockchain for Europe Summit, Next Web Amsterdam, Internet Week Denmark.<< Results >>The general outcome of the BC4ECO project will be an established strategic partnership of four organisations from across four countries - Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands and Russia - in teaching distributed ledger applications development for environmental good. It will provide a standard of excellence for higher education in Europe in this area. All project results will contribute to this outcome. The major results of the project will be the design and validation of the innovative curriculum - an interdisciplinary course “Blockchain for the Environment” (6 ECTS) enriched with digital and interactive Open Educational Resources (OERs). The course will consist of two modules - basic and advanced - 3 ECTS each, made available through a MOOC platform. The ‘basic’ module and the first MOOC “Basics of Blockchain for the Environment” will explain the main principles of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and its potential for environmental protection to Bachelor and Master students who have never been taught about this technology before. The module will combine explanations of DLT principles with such approaches as critical thinking, design thinking, behavioural design, environmental intelligence. Students will learn how to use these approaches for creating DLT applications capable of convincing people to make eco-friendly decisions. The module will also equip the non-technical audiences, e.g. staff of ‘green’ NGOs, with the building blocks necessary to work smoothly as a team with computer scientists capable of building DLT applications. The ‘advanced’ module and the second MOOC ""Leverage Blockchain for the Environment"" are aimed at Computer Science students at the Masters level and with a certain background in distributed applications design. The module will guide students through the entire cycle: from analysing environmental challenges, selecting those issues that can be solved with the use of DLT, identifying the role of social actors in the problem, using design thinking methods to ideate solutions, and applying knowledge of behavioural psychology to build DLT applications that allow to alter social behaviour for the benefit of the environment. The set of digital OERs that BC4ECO will produce includes an e-Course Reader, a Video Collection, a Teacher Guide, an Interactive Multimedia eBook, and an online Ecosystem for Learning and Project Development. These OERs will make the entire course available to different types of learners, while the project results - better known and accessible Europe-wide. The OERs will be piloted in the partner organisations during two Summer Schools. Creation of the Teacher Guide will allow to introduce the BC4ECO educational modules beyond the partner organisations and help to improve the quality of teaching and training in this breakthrough area in Europe, thus boosting skills and employability of learners.The BC4ECO team will also develop a novel pedagogical framework showcasing the non-functional characteristics of DLT: immutability, irreversibility, transparency, consensus, distributed ledger, peer-to-peer transmission, provenance tracking, fast but costly nature of transactions. The methodology will be first formulated in the Concept Paper ""Translating the Distributed Ledger Technology Approach into Innovative and ‘Green’ Educational Methodology"", then tested with stakeholders, elaborated in the Teacher Guide and, finally, after the analysis of all lessons learnt during the project implementation, presented for a wide audience in the Interactive Multimedia eBook format. All project results will be designed in regular consultations with stakeholders. They will be suitable for on-campus, online or hybrid teaching and learning. The BC4ECO will also create conditions for the recognition and certification (ECTS credits) of learning achievements, both in the organisations within the partnership and beyond, to make it more appealing to replicate the course for other universities."

DRIVE 0 aims to come to a decarbonization of the EU building stock and to accelerate deep renovation processes by enhancing a consumer centred circular renovation process in order to make deep renovation more attractive for consumers and investors, more environmental friendly.This by combining the need for a circular building industry with the identification of specific local or national drivers to trigger and to motivate end-users for deep renovation, supported by an anthropology based and environmentally friendly approach to make it costumer-centred and respectful of local geo-material areas, by following 4 steps: 1. Developing proven deep renovation products and concepts for example from several recent EU projects, further to circular renovation products and concepts based on local available materials and components, with emphasis on easy to install Plug & Play prefab solutions for envelope elements and building services. 2. Developing attractive consumer centred business models based on circular renovation concepts supported by digitalization and gamification. 3. Providing occupants with attractive and understandable information on total building performances in use. 4.Providing stakeholders evidence of performance of the developed solutions by local study and demonstration cases initiated by ‘local drivers’. The objectives are: 1: To develop proven Plug & Play prefab deep renovation solutions for building elements and building services towards circular renovation products. 2: To provide consumers and potential investors of deep renovation projects with attractive and understandable information of real total performances (energy use, indoor environment and well-being). 3: To demonstrate circular renovation solutions in combination with local drivers in live demonstration cases. 4: To foster new consumer centred business models for circular circular renovation concepts. 5: To roll out the concept on a wider EU scale by involving EU interest groups.

The overall aim of SAFEST is to enhance the scientific and technological capacity of Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) in the field of Hardware Security, to be achieved through networking activities with its internationally-leading Twinning partners: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Technische Universität München (TUM), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), and Technische Universität Graz (TU Graz). To achieve its overall aim, the 3 year project will build upon the existing strong competences of TalTech in closely-related fields, to be complemented by the specific know-how of the Twinning partners. TalTech will also make use of best practices learned from its previous Twinning experience as an enabler to the success of this project. To boost their scientific excellence and innovation capacity, the partners will implement a networking strategy focused on four complementary subtopics: - Test for security (CNRS) - Reverse engineering and defences (TUM) - Side channel attacks (KU Leuven) - Hardware-software architectural vulnerabilities (TU Graz) The networking strategy takes into account the SWOT analysis of TalTech and has the following objectives: Objective 1: Strengthen the research capability of TalTech and its Twinning partners in the area of Hardware Security Objective 2: Promote TalTech's competitiveness through sustainable participation in collaborative research efforts Objective 3: Raise the research profile of TalTech and the Twinning partners Objective 4: Contribute to the safety aspects of e-Estonia In order to realize these objectives, the partners will implement a comprehensive set of measures via the following work packages (WPs): - Short term staff exchanges (WP1) - Short term exchanges of early stage researchers (WP2) - Organization of workshops and summer schools (WP3) - Dissemination and outreach (WP4) - Project management (WP5)

In times of rising unemployment, lack of economic growth, making use of new learning opportunities outside the formal system, and of the skills acquired through prior learning, is urgent. Nowadays, more than 120 million people are living in poverty or at the threat of falling into one, approx. 25 million people are unemployed, while 77 million Europeans still have at most lower secondary education. The Europe 2020 Strategy stresses the need for more flexible learning pathways as a pre-requisite and a strong incentive for the fulfilment of the agreed social targets: 20 million fewer people in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion, 75% of the 20-64 year-olds should be employed, reduction of school drop-out rates below 10%.The lack of meaningful, well-described, easily accessible information about Lifelong Learning Opportunities and of policy frameworks and tools for linking skills and qualifications gained across different phases and contexts, into forming flexible pathways for personal development and competitiveness in the labour market, constitute hindering factors for the implementation of the aforementioned objectives.The project on Composing Lifelong Learning Opportunity Pathways through Standards-based Services (ComPaSS) addresses the fundamental goal of the ET 2020 on 'making lifelong learning and mobility a reality' and its key objectives on skills for growth, competitiveness and employability, by targeting awareness-raising and institutional commitment, coordination and partnership of relevant actors and stakeholders active in the field of Education and Training (ET).The consortium, constituting Higher Education Institutions, an association of University departments of informatics and a national standardization organization, has implemented an integrated approach that addresses these issues, elaborating on both policy and technological aspects with an emphasis on the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. More precisely COMPASS has focused on:•raising awareness on the concept of flexible pathways through the use of existing European and national guidance instruments (Ploteus) for access to Learning Opportunities•producing policy suggestions for the implementation of flexible pathways•recommending a standard for enabling Learning Opportunity providers to engage in well-structured description of their offers. These descriptions can be exploited by existing tools to enrich their contents, making an impact on the quantity and quality of Learning opportunity information at a European level•developing free, publicly available online services for Learning Opportunity description and pathway development•Implementing nation-wide pilot tests for the ICT-sector.Leveraging its rich strategic plan and the consortium's pan-European network of Higher Education Institutions, policy makers and the Industry, the project provides standards-based educational opportunities to university students in order to illustrate its innovative policy and technology solutions, boosting awareness and reforms in favour of skills growth.