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.

The objective of SHEER is to develop best practices for assessing and mitigating the environmental footprint of shale gas exploration and exploitation. The consortium includes partners from Italy, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, USA. It will develop a probabilistic procedure for assessing short and long-term risks associated with groundwater contamination, air pollution and induced seismicity. The severity of each of these depends strongly on the unexpected enhanced permeability pattern, which may develop as an unwanted by-product of the fracking processes and may become pathway for gas and fluid migration towards underground water reservoirs or the surface. An important part of SHEER will be devoted to monitor and understand how far this enhanced permeability pattern will develop both in space and time. These hazard may be at least partially inter-related as they all depend on this enhanced permeability pattern. Therefore they will be approached from a multi-hazard, multi parameter perspective. SHEER will develop methodologies and procedures to track and model fracture evolution around shale gas exploitation sites and a robust statistically based, multi-parameter methodology to assess environmental impacts and risks across the operational lifecycle of shale gas. The developed methodologies will be applied and tested on a comprehensive database consisting of seismicity, changes of the quality of ground-waters and air, ground deformations, and operational data collected from past case studies. They will be improved by the high quality data SHEER will collect monitoring micro-seismicity, air and groundwater quality and ground deformation in a planned hydraulic fracturing to be carried out by the Polish Oil and Gas Company in Pomerania. Best practices to be applied in Europe to monitor and minimize any environmental impacts will be worked out with the involvement of an advisory group including governmental decisional bodies and private industries.

Blue-Cloud addresses the IA ‘The Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative’ (BG-07-2019-2020) for the following topic: [A] 2019 - Blue Cloud services. The project implements a practical approach to address the potential of cloud based open science to achieve a set of services identifying also longer term challenges to build and demonstrate the Pilot Blue Cloud as a thematic EOSC cloud to support research to better understand & manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators. It seeks to capitalise on what exists already and to develop and deploy, through a pragmatic workplan, the pilot Blue Cloud as a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to: 1) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, 2) analytical tools, & 3) computing facilities essential for key blue science use cases. Outputs include: a Blue Cloud Framework, Data Discovery & Access Service (approx. 400 users) & VRE (approx. 1,000 users) from 25 countries, Blue Cloud Service Catalogue including 50+ services deployed through 5 compelling pilot demonstrators, A Blue Cloud 2030 implementation Policy Roadmap, Whitepaper on outcomes of the Food/Blue-Cloud Pilots to support the implementation of thematic EOSC, 4 focused Roadmap events & Workshops, 1 hackathon, 10 webinars, 1 Final results conference, engaged community with all stakeholder groups represented. Led by a consortium bringing together leading European marine data management infrastructures, EOSC horizontal e-infrastructures, and excellent marine researchers. Coordinated by a neutral ICT intensive SME with over 15 years’ experience, technically coordinated by a community leading marine & ocean data specialist, and supported by 17 experienced partners, from research, academia & industry, with strategic and practical involvement in design and delivery of blue community needs. An influential External Stakeholders Experts Board & an Expert Foresight Group support the project.