The purpose of the proposal put together by the Climate JPI and the Water JPI is to “enable collaboration between national research and innovation funding members to address together the protection of cultural heritage in Europe and beyond. With this purpose, both JPIs will support the implementation of multi-annual joint activities that will focus on the better understanding of, and the identification of best available adaptation solutions in response to hydroclimatic extreme events”. The Consortium established by both JPIs gathers today 16 organisations including programme owners (funding agencies from Belgium, France, Georgia, Italy, Malta, UK, Kenya, Portugal and Romania), research performing organisations/ academia, foundations and private companies. The following operational objectives have been laid out by the Consortium: - Enhance cross-sector collaborations and strategic coordination between water, climate and cultural heritage. - Launch and monitor joint activities to measure progress towards widening. - Address potential barriers for collaboration. - Evaluate the impacts of those joint activities on widening policies as well as EU and international policy frameworks, notably the EU Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). - Implement joint activities enabling the market, regulatory and societal uptake of results. The project will be structured around 6 work packages (WP) looking at the coordination of activities (WP1), the identification of relevant gaps in the fields of cultural heritage, water and climate (WP2), the launch of joint activities, the TAP instrument (Thematic Annual Programming; WP3), communication and dissemination of project results (WP4), the analysis of impacts of proposed actions on EU widening strategies (WP5), and the implementation of specific tools to enable the social, regulatory and market uptake of proposed innovations stemming from joint activities (WP6).

PITHIA-NRF aims at building a European distributed network that integrates observing facilities, data processing tools and prediction models dedicated to ionosphere, thermosphere and plasmasphere research. For the first time, PITHIA-NRF integrates on a European scale, and opens up, to all European researchers, key national and regional research infrastructures such as EISCAT, LOFAR, Ionosondes and Digisondes, GNSS receivers, Doppler sounding systems, riometers, and VLF receivers, ensuring optimal use and joint development. PITHIA-NRF is designed to provide organized access to experimental facilities, FAIR data, standardized data products, training and innovation services. Furthermore, PITHIA-NRF facilitates drastically research advances in the field of upper atmosphere and near-Earth space, through the integration of data collections from satellite missions (such as Cluster, DEMETER, Swarm and CHAMP) and results from key prediction models (such as IPIM-IRAP, MCM-SWAMI, SWIF and EUHFORIA) that can be accessed by scientific users for join exploitation with the data collected from the research infrastructures of the network. PITHIA-NRF paves the way for new observing technologies, and to standard-making processes for software and high-level data products that are tuned to meet the requirements of technologies concerned, linking best-in-class R&D facilities to provide seamless multi-technology services.

Within the European Research Area (ERA), the ERA4CS Consortium is aiming to boost, research for Climate Services (CS), including climate adaptation, mitigation and disaster risk management, allowing regions, cities and key economic sectors to develop opportunities and strengthen Europe’s leadership. CS are seen by this consortium as driven by user demands to provide knowledge to face impacts of climate variability and change, as well as guidance both to researchers and decision‐makers in policy and business. ERA4CS will focus on the development of a “climate information translation” layer bridging “user communities” and “climate system sciences”. It implies the development of tools, methods, standards and quality control for reliable, qualified and tailored information required by the various field actors for smart decisions. ERA4CS will boost the JPI Climate initiative by mobilizing more countries, within EU Member States and Associated Countries, by involving both the research performing organizations (RPOs) and the research funding organizations (RFOs), the distinct national climate services and the various disciplines of academia, including Social Sciences and Humanities. ERA4CS will launch a joint transnational co-funded call, with over 16 countries and up to 75M€, with two complementary topics: (i) a “cash” topic, supported by 12 RFOs, on co-development for user needs and action-oriented projects; (ii) an “in-kind” topic, supported by 28 RPOs, on institutional integration of the research components of national CS. Finally, ERA4CS additional activities will initiate a strong partnership between JPI Climate and others key European and international initiatives (as Copernicus, KIC-Climate, JPIs, WMO/GFCS, Future Earth, Belmont Forum…) in order to work towards a common vision and a multiyear implementation strategy, including better co-alignment of national programs and activities up to 2020 and beyond.

Aviation is one of the most critical infrastructures of the 21st century. Even comparably short interruptions can cause economic damage summing up to the Billion-Euro range. As evident from the past, aviation shows certain vulnerability with regard to natural hazards. The proposal EUNADICS-AV addresses airborne hazards (environmental emergency scenarios), including volcano eruptions, nuclear accidents and emergencies and other scenarios where aerosols and certain trace gases are injected into the atmosphere. Such events are considered rare, but may have an extremely high impact, as demonstrated during the European Volcanic Ash Crisis in 2010. Before the 1990s, insufficient monitoring as well as limited data analysis capabilities made it difficult to react to and to prepare for certain rare, high-impact events. Meanwhile, there are many data available during crisis situations, and the data analysis technology has improved significantly. However, there is still a significant gap in the Europe-wide availability of real time hazard measurement and monitoring information for airborne hazards describing “what, where, how much” in 3 dimensions, combined with a near-real-time European data analysis and assimilation system. The main objective of EUNADICS-AV is to close this gap in data and information availability, enabling all stakeholders in the aviation system to obtain fast, coherent and consistent information. This would allow a seamless response on a European scale, including ATM, ATC, airline flight dispatching and individual flight planning. In the SESAR 2020 Programme Execution Framework, EUNADICS-AV is a SESAR Enabling project (project delivering SESAR Technological Solutions). The project aims at passing a SESAR maturity level V2, which includes respective service validation activities, including validation exercises. Work will be also done to prepare a full V3 validation.

Travelling Ionospheric Disturbances (TIDs) constitute a threat for operational systems for which the ionosphere is an essential part (i.e., radio systems) or for which the ionosphere is fundamentally a nuisance (i.e. GNSS based systems and applications). The overarching objective of TechTIDE is to design and test new viable TID impact mitigation strategies for the technologies affected by the TIDs and in close collaboration with operators of these technologies, to demonstrate the added value of the proposed mitigation techniques which are based on TechTIDE products. To achieve this main goal, it is necessary to address the following specific objectives: i. Improve understanding regarding the physical processes resulting in the formation of TIDs, and consequently to identify the drivers in the interplanetary medium, the magnetosphere and the atmosphere; ii. Define the impact of the TIDs on the space based navigation systems (mainly EGNOS services and N-RTK) and on ground-based HF communication and geolocation systems; iii. Develop improved methodologies, based on consortium partners’ algorithms, suitable to support for the first time the direct,real-time identification and tracking of TIDs over wide world regions; iv. Establish an operational system to issue warnings of the occurrence of TIDs over the region extending from Europe to South Africa, to estimate the parameters that specify the TID characteristics and the inferred perturbation, and provide all additional geophysical information to the users to help them assess the risks and to develop mitigation techniques, tailored to their applications; v. Work systematically with potential users to assess the functionality, reliability and efficiency of the TechTIDE services paving the way to its systematic exploitation from users and to its sustainable operation.