Gov4Nano will design and establish a well-positioned and broadly supported Nano Risk Governance Council (NRGC). Organizing, connecting and engaging are key activities in Gov4Nano and its creation of a sustainable NRGC. Gov4Nano will develop an operational trans disciplinary Nano Risk Governance Model (NRGM) for nanotechnologies, building on an established governance framework developed by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC). Engaging stakeholders (including regulators) to proactively address nano-specific safety and seek dialogue for joint activities. NRGC and its precursor project Gov4Nano will engage, in order to support these activities, with the broad variety of stakeholders across all relevant nano-disciplines (chemical, biocides, food and feed, pharma and medical devices and materials development) and draft a review on our knowledge progress over the last decade whilst initiating dialog. To boost the quality of the dialog it will create a platform for dialogues between stakeholders in a “trusted environment” inclusive of civil society. The NRGC core business is to coordinate, guide and harmonize in order to overcome the fragmentation of current knowledge, information and needs over various sectors and disciplines (workers, consumers/patients, environmental safety) and to prepare the transfer of this knowledge. To that end, the NRGC will be equipped with a self-sustainable NanoSafety Governance Portal (NSGP) consolidating state-of-the-art and progressive nanosafety governance tools including ones for dialogues and measuring risk perception. Major efforts will be towards requirements for data harmonization and data curation to be defined and laid down in guidance on obtaining harmonized and standardized quality-scored data collections promoting a big data approach for nano-toxicology. Research activities will be initiated for regulatory sound knowledge in support of harmonized (OECD) guidance for characterization and testing of nanomaterials.

By advancing breakthrough research on LOHC technologies, UnLOHCked aims at developing a radically disruptive, versatile and scalable LOHC-dehydrogenation plant. Firstly, highly active and stable catalysts without critical raw materials will be developed for reducing LOHC dehydrogenation at moderate temperatures. Secondly, an SOFC-system will be developed to be thermally integrated with the dehydrogenation process. The heat demand of the dehydrogenation unit will be fully covered by the fuel cell, while generating electric power. The surplus of hydrogen is exported. These innovative systems fully integrated will allow significant increase of overall efficiency (>50%) to hydrogen and electric power production from LOHC. Three industry partners, HERAEUS, HYGEAR and FRAMATOME, will collaborate with four universities and research centres, the University of Bilbao (Spain), CEA, CNRS-Lyon and North-West University of South Africa to develop scalable prototype system at TRL 5, validating the performance of the technology during at least 500 h. The ambition is to demonstrate the feasibility of a fully CO2-free dehydrogenation process for large-scale production of hydrogen (100-1,000 t H2/d) and electricity with competitive prices (hydrogen carrier delivery cost <2.5€/kg). Thus converting CO2-free LOHC to electricity and hydrogen instead of using NG or LPG as heat source. The UnLOHCked approach is clean & circular: it decreases energy consumption, does not use noble metals while generating CO2-free hydrogen and electricity. Techno-economic studies will demonstrate the potential of the technology to both supply hydrogen and renewable electricity to decarbonise the EU economy and to open-up hydrogen transportation by LOHC. FRAMATOME, HYGEAR AND HERAEUS will support the consortium preparing for fast market entry after the project.

Modern-day amphibians are known to be suffering rates of extinction that far exceed any other class of vertebrates, including those experienced by mammals and birds, and nearly one third of amphibian species are threatened. The question of why amphibians are going extinct at these accelerated rates has puzzled scientists for three decades. A clue to the mystery came about when scientists working in Central America and Australia noted that the declines in amphibian biodiversity were spreading in a wave-like manner, from a point source. These patterns of decline were caused by an emerging infectious disease, and in 1997 researchers discovered the fungal pathogen and named it Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). Since then, our research has been focused on finding out where the fungus is, where it is spreading to and what its effect is on amphibian biodiversity. We have made a mapping tool at www.bd-maps.net and this has shown that Bd occurs on all continents with amphibians. However, not all species and populations infected with Bd die, suggesting to us that there may be more than one strain (or lineage) of Bd and that these are not all equally destructive. Confirmation of this came when we used new whole genome sequencing technology to sequence isolates of Bd from around the world. We discovered three lineages of Bd, and showed that only one of them is responsible for mass mortalities and species declines. We named this lineage BdGPL for 'Bd Global Panzootic Lineage' and showed that it occured in Africa, Europe, Australia and America. Currently, several lines of argument suggest that BdGPL evolved in Africa. We will investigate this 'Bd Out-of-Africa' hypothesis by sequencing the genomes of Bd isolates widely across Africa and Europe, and undertaking fine-scale studies of the pathogens impact where it has been introduced into new environments. Our project will investigate both broad- and fine-scale processes, by characterising the genome diversity of Bd at the continental-level, but also focusing on fine-scale evolutionary patterns in Africa, the Pyrenees, the Alps and the UK. We will twin these genomic approaches with experimental approaches in order to determine whether invasive 'outbreak' lineages have altered their virulence and infectivity owing to accelerated evolution by the action of natural selection. Here, our expectation is that outbreak lineages that are adapting to new environments and hosts will have increased virulence and transmission rates when compared against the ancestral lineage in its original geographic background. These experiments will not only give us added certainty when determining the geographic origins of these infections, but will also allow us to assess why BdGPL is so much more virulent, and transmittable, than the other lineages of Bd. More widely, our research will inform us about the risk that new pathogens pose to uninfected environments. Currently, we are seeing many emerging pathogenic fungi causing untold destruction to forests, bats and frogs. Perhaps there are common processes that underlie these emergences of disease - not only global trade in infected goods but also genome-level processes that are unique to fungi? Projects such as that described here hold the key to answering these important questions before losses of biodiversity increase further.

Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers (LOHC), consisting on a reversible transformation catalytically activated of a pair of stable liquid organic molecules integrated on hydrogenation/dehydrogenation cycles, are attractive due to their ability to store safely large amounts of hydrogen (up to 7 %wt or 2.300 KWh/ton) during long time and release pure hydrogen on demand. Proof of concept and some commercial solutions exist but still suffer from high cost and energy needed to facilitate catalytic reactions. In order to reduce the system cost for LOHC technology to 3 €/Kg for large scale applications SherLOHCk project targets joint developments consisting on :i) highly active and selective catalyst with partial/total substitution of PGM and thermo-conductive catalyst support to reduce the energy intensity during loading/unloading processes: ii) novel catalytic system architecture ranging from the catalyst to the heat exchanger to minimize the internal heat loss and to increase space-time-yield and iii) novel catalyst testing, system validation and demonstration in demo unit (>10 kW, >200h); to drastically improve their technical performances and energy storage efficiency of LOHCs: A combination of challenges for the catalyst material, catalyst system and their related energy storage capabilities will constitute the core of a catalyst system for LOHC, that will be validated first at a lab scale, then in a demo unit > 10kW. As a whole they will enable the reduction of Energy intensity during loading/unloading processes, a higher efficiency and increased lifetime. Technological, economical and societal bottlenecks are considered to determine the economic viability, balance of energy and the environmental footprint of novel catalyst synthesis route. Scale-up of the obtained solutions will be carried out together with technology comparison with other hydrogen logistic concepts based on LCA and TCO considerations to finally improve economic viability of the LOHC technology.

MATS aims to identify key leverage points for changes in agricultural trade policy that foster the positive and reduce the negative impacts of trade on environmental sustainability and human well-being. Focus is on improving the design, governance and implementation of trade regimes and policies at private sector, national, EU, African and global levels. The key operational features of MATS are: a) a set of 15 in-depth country, regional and product case studies to provide a deeper understanding of the conditions for sustainable trade, an integrated multi-model simulation and assessment of linkages with agricultural market, trade and investment dynamics, and an analy-sis of institutional, regulatory and legal frameworks; b) a multi-stakeholder backcasting approach that builds on recent research related to transformative change and social innovation, and that uses novel participatory methods and platforms to explore transition pathways towards sustainable trade; c) a clustering with other trade-related research projects to benefit from synergies, and a major role for sector representatives, social movements and policymakers in framing analyses, co-assessing linkages, and deriving policy recommendations. MATS has the ambition to set a new benchmark in trade policy analysis. The main project outputs will be: (1) New quantitative and qualitative insights on the interactions between agricultural markets, trade, investments, policy, environmental sustainability and human well-being. (2) A set of Discussion Papers and Policy Briefs, incl. recommendations for enhancing the coherence of agricultural and trade policies with the SDGs. (3) An enhanced civil society–stakeholder–policy dialogue that is supported by an evidence-based communication platform – the Sustainable Trade Hub. (4) A set of innovative research tools for the analysis of the interactions between agricultural trade, agricultural investments, policy, environmental sustainability and human well-being.