Mountain ecosystems worldwide face multiple threats arising from global change and its interactions with socio-cultural, economic and political developments. Together, these factors impact on the ability of mountains to support the livelihoods of more than 50% of the human population with essential ecosystem services. Based on past and current observations, as well as climate projections, aquatic mountain ecosystems are particularly vulnerable and at risk. In light of their roles as major water reservoirs for humankind and as biodiversity hotspots in generally sparse high-altitude landscapes, this is a major concern. Besides climate change, fish stocking of naturally fishless lakes has been identified as particularly detrimental to water quality and biodiversity. Due to the magnitude of the ecological impact and to the global extent of fish introductions into mountain lakes, introduced fish are perhaps the most important threat to mountain lake biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and water quality. This threat is particularly important as fish introductions co-occur with a number of other anthropogenic activities such as human population growth, changing economic activities, land-use change, urbanization, pollution, loss and degradation of aquatic habitats, overexploitation, flow modifications and alien species invasions. Together and in interaction with climate change, these factors accelerate and exacerbate the environmental and ecological degradation of mountain aquatic ecosystems and the loss of unique species and life forms. Yet, despite strong concerns over the long-term health and functioning of aquatic ecosystems, experimental and restoration studies that link fish stocking to pollution, aquatic disease ecology, and ecosystem health, are still scarce. Fish will address the following main questions: 1. What are the socio-economic, cultural, and environmental drivers for fish stocking in mountain lakes? 2. What is the impact of fish stocking and which are the future social and ecological trajectories of the ongoing invasion process under climate and global change scenarios? 3. How can the detrimental effects of fish introductions be mitigated, while minimizing the impact on the livelihood and well-being of local human populations? The FishME restoration project will combine the socio-economic, ecological and political dimensions of a Pan-European approach to propose effective management measures for improving the restoration and conservation of aquatic mountain ecosystems. FishME will fill the current knowledge gap and inform decision makers, stakeholders, and policy makers on the best ways forward to conserve and manage mountain aquatic ecosystems and the important services they provide to billions of people globally. FishME is responding to several SDGs (2, 3, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15), especially of importance in a mountain context and is in accordance with the EU nature restoration plan within the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

The ACUTE project aims at establishing a Knowledge Hub for ENUAC that enables exchange within the field of urban accessibility and connectivity. The purpose is to overcome the fragmentation of findings, experiences, competencies and results. ACUTE addresses the challenges of sustainable urban passenger mobility, freight transport, connectivity and accessibility as an integral and essential part of sustainable urban development. ACUTE aims to create a space for stakeholder exchange and co-creation. It provides an inclusive environment for urban actors with diverse backgrounds (researchers, practitioners, public administrators, entrepreneurs, social innovators, etc.) to discuss current themes and priorities and identify the most pressing urban challenges of today and the future. ACUTE will support ENUAC-funded projects and enable cross-project cooperation. Also it will extract, consolidate and synthesise knowledge from these projects and provide it to other stakeholders and projects. Further it will initiate efforts to support practitioners and the mainstreaming of research results and provide strategic support for the future Horizon Europe Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) programme. ACUTE has a carefully selected consortium from geographically different regions and complementary areas of knowledge with contacts to relevant networks. This will ensure the dissemination of the project outcomes to many countries and cities in Europe.

The focus of the ANR proposal is to launch a network joining European and non-European teams working on local development in the highlands, in order to submit a proposal to RISE (Research and Innovation Staff Exchange) Marie Curie Program/H2020 early 2017. The objectives of the RISE proposal will be (i) share and debate the diverse initiatives and innovations of local development in the highlands, (ii) develop specific capacity building focused on different types of stakeholders and local people, (iii) participate in policymaking through relevant suggestions, monitoring and assessment of actions and (iv) strengthen a recognized European competence on the local development in the highlands. The partnership for the ANR proposal, and consequently for the RISE proposal, is based four countries of European Union (Austria, France, Portugal and United Kingdom), two other European countries (Norway and Switzerland) and non-European countries in Mediterranean (Morocco and Lebanon), the Americas (Argentina, Canada, Equator, Peru, the United States) and Eastern Asia (China and Vietnam). Research question is adaptation process and resilience of high mountain societies to global change, especially initiatives and innovations focused on local development. Several initiatives of local development in the highlands were implemented in the countries of the European Union, although the concepts have sometimes been built in other areas, as for example natural parks, reserves of biodiversity, reserves of biosphere, “regional” parks, winter and summer slow tourism, many small agribusiness factories for cheeses, liquors, fruits, etc. Diverse reasons justified these implementations in the European Union, especially the specific policies made at national and European level, which strongly incentivized and supported these initiatives, in order to reduce the disadvantages of these regions, mainly due to their weak access and their long distance to decisions centers. Indeed, focused on the sustainable development, the specific national and European policies significantly impacted local development in European highlands, compared with non-European highlands where economic issues and national interest usually lead their development, especially in developing countries. Moreover, the supportive context for local development initiatives lead to new initiatives and also innovations focused on the improvement of these initiatives and the building of new initiatives, including in policymaking. In other words, based on the European Union experience, the implementation of local development could lead to new steps of local development. It is a research hypothesis to be verified in European Union and tested in the other zones. A priori, for the method of the RISE proposal, we suggest using the concept of co-viability, which includes both viability and its regulation, to analyze resilience factors at different scales, representations and local knowledge, access to resources and policymaking in global change context. This point has to be debate with the partner in the next months. In terms of activity to be developed in 2016 in order to build the RISE proposal, firstly there are five visits to each of the European partners in order to better share the common objectives of the RISE proposal, select the local development initiatives for the compare analysis and draft a concept note of the RISE proposal. Secondly, a workshop joining the leaders of European partners with 3-4 leaders of non-European teams will allow to better define the contents of the proposal and to draft a first version.

This project seeks to establish a radically new, alternative approach to realizing the fundamental building blocks of quantum computers with superconducting qubits. In the next 3 years, we plan to employ only a handful of realistic components to realize robust error-corrected logical quantum bits. We aim to demonstrate the same level of protection provided by a few hundreds of qubits (with properties beyond the state of the art) in today’s mainstream approach of the so-called surface code architecture. Our alternative approach is known as cat codes, because it employs multiple interconnected high coherence cavity modes with non-linear dissipation, to encode a qubit in superpositions of Schrödinger cat states. Our project combines realizing the quantum processor architecture as well as the control system and the protocols that drive it, building towards a full-stack error-corrected quantum computer. The partners in our collaboration form a strong synergetic group that has the full range of expertise needed to design and realize these systems, and to obtain these challenging goals. Furthermore, all partners of our project, including both industry and academia, have worked together and published works in the fields of quantum computing and quantum information processing.. We aim to implement error protected qubits, fault tolerant operations, and demonstrate the scalability of this approach by realizing a repetition code. Our project will enable quantum experiments towards the ambitious and well-defined goal of constructing a logical qubit, on which we can perform gates, and most importantly, quantum error-correctio (QEC). All algorithms with theoretically proven quantum speedup require QEC, therefore, with this project we are realizing an essential building block of a European error corrected quantum processor.