This FPA provides comprehensive programming and support for the European Commission’s Mission of 100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030. It builds on the NetZeroCities (NZC) project, coordinated by CKIC. Combined, these two initiatives set out actions as follows: (a) Create and operate a Cities Mission Platform as a ‘one-stop-shop’ to access the expertise, capabilities, services, and solutions necessary to achieve climate neutrality. This Platform will provide tailored and intensive support to cities participating in the Mission and will ensure open access to the knowledge and resources of the Platform. (b) Help all Mission Cities with the co-creation and use of Climate City Contracts (CCC) to enable an ambitious pursuit of the goal of climate neutrality by 2030. This FPA expressly seeks to ensure all Mission Cities are supported and builds directly on the initial scope of NZC. In addition, support will be offered to additional cities seeking to follow closely the Mission. (c) Assist Mission cities in the development of tailor-made investment plans, project preparation and finance for the cities participating in the Mission; (d) Deliver substantial resources to Mission cities for ongoing research and innovation activities critical to achieving climate neutrality by 2030. This support will be in the form of ‘pilot’ funding to test and demonstrate actions needed to deliver climate neutral outcomes. This pilot activity will work together with the Platform and CCC processes in the cities, operationalizing emerging knowledge and insights about how cities can achieve the Mission objectives; and (e) Ensure ongoing monitoring and evaluation of cities in their progress toward climate neutrality and deploy peer-based learning to ensure full appropriability of the result from the Mission. The FPA periods extends through 2027 and provides for two planned Specific Grant Agreement (SGA) phases, where a precise plan, targets and metrics will be established.

The European Commission’s Mission for “100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” (“the Cities Mission”) seeks to accelerate Europe’s climate action commitments as part of the European Green Deal, whose ambition is to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The Cities Mission’s central tenet is to elevate and deepen the commitment to pursue systemic change through research and innovation, setting an ambition for cities of unprecedented scope and scale. In order to achieve such effects, a demand-driven Mission Platform has been established to provide tailored assistance and services to participating cities and those learning from them. As a part of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme, Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Green Deal call, the “LC-GD- 1-2-2020: Towards Climate-Neutral and Socially Innovative Cities” topic selected the four-year project NetZeroCities to establish the Mission Platform, which began work at the same time as the formal establishment of the Cities Mission, in October 2021. The scope of work presented herein will comprise the second Specific Grant Agreement (SGA2-NZC) development under the Framework Partnership Agreement FPA-NZC for the Mission Platform to scale and continue operations through 2027. Activities primarily focus on two objectives: the first to reinforce the support received by cities selected to participate in the Mission on financing their roadmap of activities towards climate neutrality, and the second to develop basic Mission Platform services for cities who are willing to commit to climate neutrality on a longer timescale than the Cities Mission.

'TOKEN' aims at developing an experimental ecosystem to enable the adoption of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) as a driver for the transformation of public services towards an open and collaborative government approach. During 32 months, a multidisciplinary consortium of 11 partners comprising (a) IT developers/RTOs with experience in development of blockchain components/IoT & Big data platforms (FBA, IMEC, VIL, CERTH, FIWARE), (b) blockchain associations (INF), (c) public administrations (AYTOSAN, KATERINI); (d) SSH experts in public management (UC) and (e) think tanks specialised in digital transformation & policy-making (DEMOS) and Open Commons business models (FBR) will develop a Blockchain Platform as a Service Solution (BCPaaS) to be tested in 4 highly replicable application areas that are common to many Public Governments across Europe: public funding distribution; management of public accounts; urban logistics; valorisation of data. BCPaaS implementation will be assessed from a multidimensional perspective (technological, cultural, socio-economic and legal impacts), paying special attention to attitudes shown by public servants, as key individuals in public service provision. BCPaaS architecture will endorse the Next Generation Internet values of trustworthiness, resilience and sustainability and keep the compliance of the privacy-by-design regulation principles as core driver. It will maximise interoperability potential with IoT & Big Data platforms as well as other blockchains. A specific business model, based on Open Commons principles and Distributed Governance, will be elaborated during the second half of the project, and project dissemination will pay specific attention to meaningfully engagement of +30 early adopters, firstly as members of TOKEN Observatory contributing to TOKEN policy learning co-creation, and, secondly, to be invited to join BCPaaS platform after the project ends, and launch roadmaps to bring DLT to other public services.

Data markets and markets for other digital goods are failing. At the same time, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has been suggested as a means to create new value and new economic structures. However, the underlying economic phenomena, especially the structural characteristics of the digital goods, are poorly understood. For over half a century, economists have made a distinction between rival and nonrival goods. Rival goods lose value when consumed, while nonrival ones may be used repeatedly, without losing value. In Ostrom's terms, the value of rival goods gets subtracted upon use; their subtractability is positive. But there has been increasing indications that many information and digital goods are anti-rival in nature. Anti-rival goods gain value when used; their subtractability is negative. Therefore their economics is also fundamentally different from that of other goods. Most importantly, creating a market price — or, more precisely, open market valuation — for them requires, beyond open markets, additional regulative or technological constructions, such as IPR or DRM, in addition to the market mechanisms. We believe that this structural disparity is a root cause for the market failures in the digital goods and data markets, behind the advent of social media monopolies, poorly working or nonexistent markets for industrial data, and many existing data markets (such as municipal ones) reducing to effectively near-zero price. In ATARCA, we create cryptographically protected anti-rival tokens and test their applicability to governing industrial data markets and fostering cooperation in community driven currencies. If successful, this technology will not only help to properly organise the markets for data and other digital goods, but provide the structural fundamentals of a new type of economic growth. This will allow the societies at large to more widely explore structurally new incentives for systemic sustainability and scalable systemic intelligence.

Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the European Union's policies on environmental and social sustainability requires a comprehensive measure of human progress that does not focus solely on GDP. However, the evidence on alternative approaches is fragmented and the lack of consensus on competing indicators and policy frameworks is a mAchieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the European Union's policies on environmental and social sustainability requires a comprehensive measure of human progress that does not focus solely on GDP. However, the evidence on alternative approaches is fragmented and the lack of consensus on competing indicators and policy frameworks is a major obstacle to setting policy goals that promote multi-dimensional well-being and to monitoring and measuring progress. MERGE addresses these challenges by providing a forum for dialogue, co-creation and knowledge exchange, and by linking cutting-edge research and policy practice. A consortium of leading researchers and key communities in the field, MERGE brings together three recently launched higher education research consortia (SPES, ToBe, WISE Horizons) and an ERC grant (REAL). To scale up results, MERGE provides a framework for creating and strengthening a multidisciplinary community of researchers, a technical and knowledge network, a policy network and a network of civil society actors. Through these networks, MERGE aims to build a broad consensus on easy-to-use and acceptable indicators and frameworks for measuring multidimensional well-being within planetary boundaries in the EU and Member States, as well as in global organisations and civil society. MERGE participants will benefit from collaborative and training events, analyses, indicators, datasets and policy briefings. Through knowledge exchange, stakeholders and researchers can adopt and develop a systematic and coherent understanding of the sustainable economy paradigm in their own work.