Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) emerged as a key approach in the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-30), which aims to scale-up restoration of degraded ecosystems to combat the climate crisis while enhancing and protecting livelihoods, food security, water, and biodiversity. Global support to strengthen and fund forest and other ecosystem restoration faces a major challenge: the mismatch between the opportunities for restoration and the capacity (knowledge, skills) needed to support it. Bangladesh and Vietnam are among the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and have a range of policies and programmes to promote and scale-up FLR. Their higher education systems are however, unable to produce graduates that fulfil the domestic or international needs related to FLR. Our general objective is to strengthen the capacity of partner HEIs to contribute to well-functioning, relevant and accessible FLR education to meet the needs of graduates, employers, and other stakeholders, for the broader benefit of the environment and society. The consortium includes 7 core partners (EU/2, Bangladesh/2, & Vietnam/3), as well as a range of international, regional, and national Associate Partners. The project builds on previous EU partner experience in capacity building projects in Asia to improve accessibility, internationalization, and modernization of partner HEI’s FLR-related capacity by transferring experience, competencies, and good practices. The design of 7 specific objectives and 6 WPs were informed by a systematic assessment of the needs and constraints of target countries, Partner HEIs, stakeholders and final beneficiaries, and linking them with the EU Call priorities and a range of FLR-related international, regional, and national processes. A range of interconnected project activities will be implemented to achieve the objectives, with the aim to empower a new generation of multidisciplinary graduates to embed FLR into their socioeconomic and cultural context

Wider objective of the BECK project – to upgrade the curricula with 16 new harmonized multidisciplinary adaptive MOOC modules on environmental protection technology in the Russian, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh universities in order to increase their capacity to continually modernise, enhance the quality and relevance of education of students to the global market needs and to ensure international cooperation. Project aims to:1. Upgrade curricula of BSc/specialists, MSc and PhD programmes in Russian, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh universities by adding 16 new multidisciplinary adaptive, recognised and certificated MOOC modules on consumer behavior related to energy efficiency and climate change;2. Transfer European practices in education (learning and teaching tools, methodologies and pedagogical approaches including learning outcomes and ICT-based practices) from participating EU universities to PC universities;3. Assist competence development of teachers within PC universities;4. Develop the Simulated Big Data Interuniversity Networked Affective Educational Centre to encourage use of ICT-based methodologies in education and research;5. Strengthen educational and scientific networking among EU and PC universities in the BECK field. The PC and EU students will profit from high quality international and multidisciplinary modules with real world positioning indicating how to employ theory in the real world. BECK project will offer adaptive certified MOOCs aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the Centre in response to the lack of knowledge in climate change and energy savings across PC countries.Seminars, round tables and national and international conferences will reach PC learners and stakeholders to notify them about the accessibility of BECK modules and the Centre. Associations will participate in this project by transferring their contemporary labor market experiences and assisting with applicable BECK case studies.

Among many communities in the EU and beyond, disasters pose significant concerns and challenges, and are an issue that requires international cooperation and solutions. In the last three decades, records of natural disasters show that Asia experiences the most disasters. A major contributory factor to disaster risk is capacity. Capacity development is a widely recognised priority in the disaster resilience field, and research cooperation can provide significant opportunities for realising its benefits. Strengthening the capacity of countries in Asia to do and use research is widely viewed as vital for meeting long term innovation in creating disaster resilience societies. ASCENT (Advancing Skill Creation to ENhance Transformation) aims to ensure that the targeted HEIs in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Thailand have the research and innovative capacities to tackle the challenges associated with developing societal resilience to disasters. ASCENT will: 1) identify research and innovative capacity needs across partner country HEIs to tackle the development of societal resilience to disasters; 2) develop research infrastructure to support implementation of the project and provide sustainable capacity development within the partner HEIs ; 3) prepare researchers in the identified Asian countries to undertake advanced, world-class and innovative, multi- and inter-disciplinary research that will contribute to increased societal resilience to disasters; 4) Increase international cooperation by partner HEIs on research programmes that tackle ways to increase societal resilience to disasters; 5) explore, promote and initiate opportunities for fruitful university / industry partnerships to increase societal resilience to disasters; and 6) publicise the project progress, successes and outcomes as far as possible, and raise awareness across the field of HE about capacity building for disaster resilience research.