Science has undergone, since the end of the XX century, a biotechnological development hardly imagined some years ago. Genetics, medicine and new technologies have transformed human reality as we knew it up to now, raising serious ethical doubts. Is everything technically possible also acceptable in ethical terms? And if so, where are the legal limits? In Biolaw it converge science to reach an advanced knowledge, ethics to question the limits and the complexity of realities and law to offer a fair response. However, the professional world and the academia lack the skills, the training opportunities and the necessary resources to cope with these problems. With this project, we hope to create a mass of well trained lecturers and professionals in the field of Biolaw at each partner institution in Costa Rica and Mexico. On the basis of the existing offer and demand, we will develop 4 capacity and 2 doctoral courses online, focused on research skills and on Bio-law specific topics. We will support the launch of a new joint doctoral programme in Mexico and will support its expansion with 1 more university in Mexico and 2 new in Costa Rica. The courses will be developed and taught online and in 3 different languages (English, French and Spanish). The new academic offer, together with a set of training and dissemination activities –international seminars, conferences and stays abroad- and the help of new elearning and bibliographical equipment, will come to integrate the partner’s doctoral and lifelong learning offer, contributing this way to the emergence of a critical mass of well trained lecturers and professionals and to its further development, also at international level.The project will surely impact not only in partner institutions, improving their accessibility, visibility and their capacity of attraction and influence, but also in the public and private sectors of Health, Environment a Law in the partner regions and countries.

Cultural heritage, origin products and biodiversity in rural areas are often underutilized or exploited according to short-term logics. SUS-TER addresses the need of developing specific knowledge, skills and abilities for the elaboration and support of inclusive and sustainable territorial valorization of these local resources. SUS-TER will develop a new interdisciplinary profile of “Territorial Enhancer” capable to activate and facilitate these processes of sustainable valorisation. He/she will be able to design and implement: - local forms of interaction between resources, society and local economy, applying a territorial development paradigm - local systems of governance of biocultural rural territories and associated knowledge and know-how- territorial marketing plans, applying methodologies that allow local enterprises to participate in markets competitively, sustainably and inclusively.This general aim will be pursued by means of the design, elaboration and testing delivering of an innovative course, based on the concepts of modularity, integration of theoretical and practical knowledge, blending of different learning methods, recognition within existing HEI curricula. Territorial laboratories will play a key role in the methodology, allowing for the integration of knowledge and practice by means of a learning space linking teachers, producers, entrepreneurs and public authorities. The course will be delivered at international level and within each university. It will be recognized by the Universities according to their institutional rules, as such or as part of existing curricula. The course and teaching materials will be in Spanish. Preliminarily, a specific training for academic staff will be carried out.SUS-TER will impact students and Universities, but also SMEs, NGOs, collective organizations, international, national and local development agencies, allowing for inclusive and sustainable processes of valorization of rural heritage.

Ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss may facilitate the emergence of zoonotic diseases. The 4-year ZOE project will analyze the links between landcover and land use changes in tropical biodiversity hot-spots facing loss of primary forest and biodiversity and in temperate regions that have undergone ecosystem degradation and deforestation over historical timescales. In areas experiencing different levels of ecosystem degradation, biodiversity assessments will be based on remote sensing-based GIS analysis of landscape structures, geobotanic plant mapping, and targeted trapping of rodents, ticks, and mosquitoes, as prototypic reservoirs and vectors of zoonotic diseases (macro-organism scale). Host- and soil-associated microbiome and virome high-throughput sequencing will be combined with assessment of human exposure to prototypic zoonotic pathogens, using high-throughput serological analyses (microbiological scale). ZOE will link with local communities and stakeholders to address perceived land use and land cover changes, disease occurrence, coping strategies, and risk behaviour. Results will be synthesized in modelling and risk mapping frameworks linking biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease risks and tested in forecasting scenarios to feed into cost-efficient monitoring schemes and early warning systems. An online knowledge platform will be created to link all relevant stakeholders of the biodiversity-health nexus, including other EU-funded consortia, national and supranational organizations stakeholders, local communities, and the public. A joint stakeholder conference will be organized, and community engagement workshops will specifically co-create and advance knowledge in local communities involved in ZOE. The ZOE project is proposed by an interdisciplinary consortium with expertise in geography, geobotanics, ecology, virology, immunology, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and science dissemination from 7 EU and 4 American countries.

Through INOVIA’s project, the mains actors of the higher and vocational education system in Brazil, Costa Rica and Bolivia, will develop adaptative capacities in the field of agrofood processing, in a context of technological, economic and social changes of the sector. The aim will consist with professionalizing the training system and promoting its integration in the productive sector, to enhance employability and integration of graduates and actively participate to the local economic development, in a shared knowledge and innovation approach among stakeholders.INOVIA aims to establish:-The Capacity of higher education institutions to operationally implement new innovative training programs with a skills oriented approach, with the cration of three modules, with one in e-learning- The foundation for the development of an appropriate and contextualized professionalization system, facilitating the introduction of experience, practice field and promoting interaction with the professionals.- Strengthening of exchange gateways and cooperation with the professional sector, through the establishment of an appropriate and scalable service offering (expertise, development, technology transfer, lifelong training) and the development of collaborative projects in a logic of public / private partnerships.- Strengthening of cooperation between partners at regional and international level.The consortium gathers major players in the partner countries and relevant international institutions in agricultural and food sectors, with a common objective to contribute to the sustainable development of products from the agricultural and food sectors in Latin America.