Bioeconomy and Circular Economy Fair Network (BioFairNet) is designed to support hotspots and specific value chains heavily reliant on greenhouse gas (GHG)-intensive industries into leaders of a sustainable bio-circular economy via a digital cooperative network. The network, understood as a digital platform and stakeholder engagement, maps, informs, transfers knowledge, and provides an exchange of communication among stakeholders to support their ecological transition. The following is achieved through instances of co-creation, testing, and validation the final product is constructed with those majorly involved aiming to close the gap on this topic between experts, public administration, businesses, and other stakeholders. The project is a deep dive into two sectors- agriculture and mining, and using a co-creation process, describes the current practice - envisions in both practical, social and economic terms what these sectors will look like post-transition and then maps a pathway to get there. The insights and tools required to support this pathway will be translated into a web-based transition tool that is both developed and implemented with end-users. In fact, the final product (network, identified as BioFairNet) that this project aims to build wants to be an item created with the stakeholders themselves.

Rural BioReFarmeries brings together farmers, industries and other partners across Europe, to demonstrate a farmer-centred bioeconomy model aimed at maximizing the potential of Europe’s vast grasslands. The project will demonstrate a novel small-scale, decentralized, rural green biorefinery value chain, which addresses the limitations of existing green biorefineries. This small-scale decentralized model places farmers at the centre of the biomass value creation close to their farms, allowing them to co-produce inputs for their farms, with additional high value-added intermediates and products, which will be further developed in collaboration with centralized facilities and downstream industry partners. The model provides a practical implementation of the bioeconomy among a large farmer cohort and builds on the existing farm enterprises and cooperative structures of our partners, enabling collaboration, scale-up, market access, and building synergies across primary and industrial sectors. The project advances state-of-the-art for green biorefinery in terms of operational model, logistics, processing, product development and assessment methods, which collectively deliver a more sustainable and profitable model for farmers and rural communities. The model will serve as a blueprint for farmers to sustainably diversify into the bioeconomy, reducing their farm emissions while creating new products which displace unsustainable alternatives in a range of agri-food markets. Rural BioReFarmeries model will be replicated to diverse regions of Europe, supported by the development of inclusive business models and hands-on training among multi-actor groups and communities in regions of high potential. The project represents a highly replicable model for Europe’s abundant grasslands, helping farmers to deal with sustainability and profitability challenges while helping rural communities to become more resilient while realizing the potential of their local bioresources.

AI-innovation in Europe lags behind the US and China. To catch up and ensure pro-European outcomes, AI-regulation constitutes the EU’s main channel to shape the future of AI-development globally. This project will support European regulators and policy makers with knowledge and tools to adequately address challenges and opportunities of trustworthy and ethical AI and to develop and enforce effective regulation of AI based on human rights, European values, and citizens' needs. AI4POL will explore how regulators can use data science and AI-driven tools to improve monitoring and enforcement of regulations such as the Data Act, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act and in consumer law. To this end, we will focus on a key innovation area, financial services, and how to increase AI-enhanced understanding and citizen feedback for the informed regulation of digital services by developing a large language model for legal jargon translation and a browser-plugin for user feedback about their understanding of laws. We will also analyze how to create and regulate trustworthy AI for financial services, for example with robo-advisors or credit scoring. Taking a long-term, geopolitical perspective, we will develop an early-warning system regarding high-risk AI in autocratic states, including the development of an AI Threat Index and dashboard and piloted with the cases of China and Russia. AI4POL pursues these objectives with a multidisciplinary, diverse research team, combining substantive expertise in AI/data science, ethics, law, economics, and political science with project management resilience, quality assurance and timeline monitoring, and risk-based intervention plans. The consortium has extensive experience in advising policy makers and has reliable contacts to various stakeholders, evidenced by AI4POL’s Advisory Board comprising EU- and national regulators and policy makers, consumer protection agencies, civil society organizations, and AI-firms.

STAR4BBS is a three-year multidisciplinary and multi-actor collaborative project, involving seven partners, three associated partners and one linked third party. The overall aim of STAR4BBS is to maximize the potential of Sustainability Certification Schemes (SCS) and labels to support a successful transition to sustainable bio-based economy. At the core of the STAR4BBS project is the development of indicators and a new monitoring system for assessing the effectiveness and robustness of existing international and EU SCS, B2B labels, and related traceability systems applicable to biological feedstock and bio-based materials and products. This information will create the foundations to support achieving the much needed harmonization between schemes and transparency in global and EU trade flows. Through the developed new monitoring system, existing SCS and labels will be analyzed, and the results, as well as additional research on certified and uncertified trade flows and on the impacts and costs and benefits of certification and labels, will substantially increase understanding of the potential of these schemes to contribute to policy and industry sustainability goals and will build awareness of the differences between the schemes. The project will involve important stakeholders (including scheme owners, policy makers, and industry) in the design of research and the monitoring system and in the development of practical recommendations emerging from the research and analysis in order to ensure that the project achieves its ultimate goal. In particular, an increased uptake of the most effective SCS and labels by the bio-based industry will support the development of circular, climate-neutral, sustainable biobased systems that will mitigate climate change, increase resource efficiency, preserve and restore ecosystems, biodiversity, natural resources, and the quality of air, water and soil.

BIORECER aims to ensure the environmental performance and traceability of the biological feedstock used by the bio-based industries, deploying guidelines to strengthen the current certification schemes. Within this approach, the added value, the use, as well as social acceptance of bioproducts will be increased. To fulfill this goal, BIORECER is structured in three main technological pillars: 1) to develop a multidimensional assessment framework for an aggregated analysis on the biological feedstocks and their associated supply chains; 2) to create a BIORECER Innovation ecosystem living-lab with a multi-agent approach, testing the framework in 4 bio-based systems supply chain cases of study, and 3) to use all this knowledge to complement current certification schemes including new criteria for certifying biological resources’ sustainability, origin, and traceability, and ensure applicability at EU and global scale. The transition to a bio-based economy is expected to deliver substantial environmental and economic benefits. Specifically, BIORECER will assess the impact of current and adapted certification schemes on consumers and bio-based industries stakeholders’ WTP along with industries and consumers’ acceptance of new bio-value chains from biological feedstocks, including residual feedstock and waste. The project proposes first to design and develop a multidimensional framework to analyze and define the assessment of the environmental performance of biological resources and traceability that will be subsequently validated in 4 full bio-based systems and applicable to a wide range of bio-based value chains. This approach will be unfolded by the joint creation of two levels of interaction: a physical one through the creation of a BioResources Stakeholders Platform (BRSP) and a “digital” one through a BIORECER ICT tool (BIT) to amplify the “scope” of the project.