THE MICS project brings together a transdisciplinary team to address a scientific and policy priority area where citizen science has the potential to promote a paradigm shift. Nature-based solutions (NBSs) are actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges and provide human well-being. NBSs have increasingly become policy and planning objectives, but major knowledge gaps in NBSs science have hindered their implementation and acceptance. This is largely due to a lack of locally specific information about the influence of: climate, location, condition and management on NBS function and impact. Furthermore, the sustainability of NBSs often depends on the perceptions and needs of stakeholders, including user groups, local communities, conservation bodies, farmers, land managers, policy makers and practitioners. Due to their systemic complexity and embedding in local context, NBSs offer a unique potential for citizen science to make a major contribution. The MICS project will support NBS research by developing strategies and tools to evaluate impacts on science and society resulting from the integration of citizen science. These tools will foster citizen science approaches that increase both scientific knowledge, and how scientific evidence is taken up by communities and policy makers. MICS will use novel impact-assessment metrics and instruments that measure costs and benefits of citizen science in relation to the NBSs, with particular attention in the domains of society; democracy; the economy; NBS science, and citizen scientists. These instruments will be grounded in a comprehensive conceptual framework and integrated into an open platform following rigorous validation in key pilot sites along a West-East EU axis. This will test the applicability of the MICS impact-assessment tools in regions with differing opportunities and constraints for NBSs, and with different levels of citizen science uptake.

TRAIN4SUSTAIN (T4S) will stimulate demand for skilled construction sector professionals (architects, contractors-SMEs and workers) through raising acceptance of regional and national qualifications and skills on the EU construction market. To this end, comparability of national qualifications and sustainable energy skills is key for increased transparency and penetration power in the market. T4S will tackle the issue of mutual recognition so that training accredited in one country is recognised easier in another country. Taking advantage of already available transnational energy skill qualification frameworks for building professions, like the BUILD UP Skills initiative, Prof/Trac scheme or the ones produced by the BIM community, and the recently developed EU framework for energy and resource efficient buildings (e.g. Level(s) ), T4S will focus on acting at market level. T4S project will foster a common understanding of sustainable energy skills across Europe by promoting a competence quality standard, a European Skills Registry and a Skills Passport for facilitating transnational recognition of learning outcomes and skill levels of existing qualifications and vocational trainings.

Coastal zones are very productive areas, offering many valuable habitats and ecosystems services and attracting human settlements and activities. The intensive concentration of population and excessive exploitation of natural resources puts high pressure on coastal ecosystems leading to biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, pollution as well as conflicts between potential uses and space competition. Several European directives aim at sustainable management of coastal waters, retaining or restoring a high ecological status and safeguarding ecosystem services. Increasing pressure and stricter regulations increase the need for efficient monitoring solutions. Where traditional in situ sampling is insufficient to characterise the highly dynamic coastal environments, Earth Observation (EO) provides a synoptic view and frequent coverage. With the launch of the Copernicus Sentinel satellites, operational water quality services become a business opportunity. CoastObs will develop a service platform for coastal water monitoring with validated products derived from EO. In dialogue with users from various sectors, CoastObs will develop innovative EO-based products: monitoring of seagrass and macro-algae, phytoplankton size classes, primary production, and harmful algae as well as higher level products such as indicators and integration with predictive models. CoastObs will establish sustainable supply chains that can be directly integrated into the users’ systems. The CoastObs consortium has the knowledge and ambition to develop services that are commercially viable, grow in capacity and thus create new jobs. The business case is to define user groups with common requirements, so tailored products can be developed at highly reduced costs per user. Setup of efficient data structures (array database) for smart (re)processing of data is part of this ambition. The commitment of 13 users to CoastObs demonstrates the need for such user-friendly and affordable coastal water services