The overall objective of NBS EduWORLD is to nurture an NBS literate society, supporting a just transition to a sustainable future. For this, NBS EduWORLD will create an NBS community that facilitates synergies between NBS professionals and education providers and ensures free and easy access to NBS knowledge and resources for all. To achieve this goal, NBS EduWORLD will summarise the state of play of NBS education in Europe and evaluate the initiatives already in place, determine how to expand and replicate them and establish a basis and framework for the project itself and future initiatives, resulting in guidance and (policy) recommendations. In parallel, the project will analyse NBS demonstrators, with an educational dimension (Tier-1), across Europe (NBS EduSystems), to support the testing and improvement of approaches and resources with NBS demonstrators with no or a limited educational dimension (Tier-2) and create the means and opportunities for all NBS practitioners to engage with educators, inter alia via Tier-3 NBS EduSystems. This will be done whilst supporting the overarching goal of promoting NBS as a viable career prospect for European citizens of all ages. To adequately engage educators who are at different points on their NBS journey, the project will provide specific activities for those who are not yet familiar with the concept and benefits of NBS, and those already aware but in need of support to progress to the next stage. These activities will be scaled up/out by extensive dissemination and communication activities to maximise the project’s outreach and ensure its long-term success. Only by joining with NBS experts + Education Experts + Civil Society + supportive policies can we create an NBS EduWORLD - a community that makes a difference.

Urban mobility across Europe is under unprecedented strain, with congestion, emissions, and infrastructure limitations threatening climate neutrality and liveability. Innovative Air Mobility (IAM) including drones and eVTOL systems, offers a transformative solution for low-emission logistics and services. Yet, widespread adoption depends not only on technical feasibility but also on societal readiness: trust, acceptance, and integration with daily life. PEGASUS addresses this challenge by embedding societal readiness as the central axis of IAM innovation, co-design, and deployment. Bringing together four of Europe’s leading IAM operators with social scientists, city authorities, and citizens, PEGASUS will pioneer a Societal Readiness Score (SRS) for IAM. Leveraging over 200,000 completed missions and 200 daily ongoing operations, the project will define, test, and improve this multidimensional metric covering noise, privacy, safety, energy, climate, and inclusivity. Real-world demonstrations in Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Bulgaria will validate technical and operational innovations designed to increase societal readiness, from low-noise propulsion and optimised flight paths to participatory planning frameworks. PEGASUS will deliver a validated IAM evaluation platform and Societal Readiness Scoreboard empowering policymakers, regulators, and operators with an evidence-based decision-support toolkit. The project will co-develop infrastructure guidelines, multimodal logistics integration models, business frameworks, and public engagement strategies, ensuring IAM is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and socially trusted. Outcomes will directly inform Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans, producing a roadmap and replication toolkit for EU-wide adoption. PEGASUS will set the standard for responsible, scalable urban air mobility in Europe accelerating climate neutrality, enabling economic growth, and fostering public trust in next-generation transport.

EPIC-WE introduces cultural game jams, culture- and value-sensitive game-making and games through and for culture as a novel approach to empower young people as co-creators of European culture and shapers of their own futures in society, cultural institutions (CHIs) and creative industries (CIs). The backbone of the project is the EPIC-WE helix ecosystem - a transferable framework where youth, CHIs, CIs and higher education institutions (HEIs) cooperate as actors in the ecosystem. Together EPIC-WE engage in cultural games jams to create games through and for culture inspired by cultural heritage. The framework explores the potentials of this approach as a method for strengthening European values, belonging and cultural participation. Through game-making activities, EPIC-WE will equip youth with cultural-creative imagination and competencies to face societal challenges with curiosity, creativity, agency and imagination – what we call Empowered Participation. The project is carried out as an ambitious Design-Based Research and Innovation (DBR) action across three European sites, where EPIC-WE ecosystem actors co-create, and through this, develop, implement and evaluate the proposed framework. The validated DBR innovations are presented as accessible resources that enable organisations across Europe to replicate the EPIC-WE ecosystem, formats, and methods. Through extensive research, capacity building and policy advocacy activities, EPIC-WE will ensure that the project’s results reach a wide range of European CHI, CI and HEI actors, including the game industry, civil society organizations and youth. The consortium is in itself a helix ecosystem, bringing together leading research, cultural and creative sector organisations with multidisciplinary excellence in DBR, participatory and value-sensitive design, game design and youth engagement to empower youth as future culture-makers and game-makers in CHIs, CCIs and HEIs and as value-sensitive agents of change in society.

Industrial sites and their surrounding regions are key drivers of Europe’s economic growth and competitiveness, providing jobs, resources, technological innovation. Industrial production and its linkages with energy, mobility, and supply chains have historically prioritized operational efficiency and short-term cost reduction often at the expense of long-term environmental and social sustainability, leading to substantial negative externalities, including high consumption of raw materials, excessive greenhouse gas emissions, high energy demand, inefficient waste and by-product management, fragmented infrastructures. These impacts extend beyond the industrial site boundaries, putting significant stress on adjacent cities and regions through air and water pollution, resource depletion, and spatial inequalities. CIRCUIT will implement a set of innovative governance mechanisms, participatory methodologies, digital tools, evaluation frameworks and upscaling activities to enable industrial sites and urban regions to transition toward sustainable, circular and climate-neutral ecosystems. The interdependencies between urban and industrial coexistence, energy systems, land use, public procurement, mobility, and waste/resource flows’ demand pose also additional challenges for this transition. CIRCUIT will leverage advanced digital technologies, i.e. interoperable dataspaces, participatory digital twins, real-time monitoring systems, and simulation models to support planning, engage stakeholders, and facilitate evidence-based decision-making. These tools will be designed for replicability and scalability, ensuring that they are adaptable and tailored to diverse local contexts and governance structures. CIRCUIT will bridge behavioral and institutional gaps by designing capacity-building programmes, communication strategies, collaborative learning environments to support local actors in adopting circular and climate-conscious practices.