The DOMINO project will nudge more than 3,400 households from the regions of Brussels, Berlin and Naples towards more energy efficient behaviour and will connect participating households in their region to nurture peer-learning and strengthen social bonds. To this end, a variety of behavioural interventions will be combined in a smart plug challenge. In this challenge, households in each region form teams that will be provided with smart plug equipment and a smartphone app allowing them to monitor and control their electricity consumption and serving as a means to directly communicate with them and support them with tailored energy conservation advice. By combining feedback, prompts, goal setting, peer comparison, rewards and other behavioural levers, the project will lead to an annual reduction in primary energy consumption of more than 14.48 GWh. Throughout the project, data will be generated that allows looking into energy consumption patterns of households and their appliances. Furthermore, the actual potential for energy savings through behavioural change as well as through the application of smart plug technology and similar innovative product-system-services can be monitored and evaluated very precisely. The project will thereby not only contribute to reducing energy consumption in the three target region and to improving the awareness for the innovative smart plug technology but will also advance the scientific and public debate on energy consumption behaviour and on behavioural interventions for energy efficiency. In addition to creating direct energy savings and to building knowledge, the project will also contribute to building capacities and skills among participating households, multipliers in energy agencies across Europe, policy-makers on national and European level as well as municipalities and energy providers. At the end of the project, smart plugs will be passed on to organsiations who will keep lending them to interested to consumers.

To reach the targets of the Paris Agreement commitments for land degradation neutrality, for biodiversity, and to support the EU Green Deal, Europe needs to join its research and innovation forces on soil carbon with those around the globe in a coordinated manner. To scale up efforts for conserving and increasing soil carbon stocks and harness the co-benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation, soil health and food security international coordination of research efforts is essential. In this context the EC supported a 1st Coordination action (CIRCASA) led by INRAE which brought together over 100 key stakeholders and 500 scientists from around the world who formalised an interest in establishing an International Research Consortium (IRC) on Soil Carbon built around an initial strategic research and innovation agenda (SRIA) focusing on agricultural soils. Operationalising the IRC requires further mobilization of the international community of stakeholders working on agricultural soil carbon but also other land uses and therefore expanding the initial SRIA as well as developing with international funding bodies an implementation plan and a central knowledge platform offering services to this community. The main goal of ORCaSa is therefore to launch and roll out the initial operational phases of the IRC on Soil Carbon so that by 2024 the IRC has established an international position as the coordinator of soil carbon research and innovation and related issues at global level offering a unique SRIA and implementation plan, supporting knowledge platform and enable the preparation of a disruptive low cost international recognized MRV system. To reach this overall goal, ORCaSa brings together European partners and 6 regional nodes covering the 5 continents around an ambitious 3-year work plan working hand in hand with the international every step of the way.

The climate system is changing rapidly and some regions have seen increases in extremes beyond what is expected from climate model simulations. To support targeted climate adaptation strategies, EXPECT will enable trustworthy assessments and predictions of regional climate change including extremes by developing a prototype operational capability for integrated attribution and prediction of climate. This ambitious goal is closely aligned with the WCRP Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change. EXPECT will identify and quantify the mechanisms by which physical processes govern regional climatic changes, including extremes, on inter-annual to multi-decadal time scales. It will do so by exploiting newly available climate simulations and Earth Observations (EOs), and by combining machine learning (ML) with physical methods. The research will target fundamental knowledge gaps related to atmospheric circulation and land-atmosphere interactions, which represent major limitations in current climate predictions and projections, and in particular in understanding changes in European summer extremes. To underpin the research, and benefitting the wider research community, EXPECT will develop tools to efficiently analyse a variety of large data sets in combination that are hosted in different repositories across institutions. This will facilitate the exploitation of recent investments into high-resolution climate models and EO data. EXPECT will further build data science capacity for the scientifically robust, efficient and reproducible analysis of the massive data assets, including novel ML approaches, and provide training for the climate science community and the next generation of researchers in particular. EXPECT will thus deliver significant scientific and technological advances for society and the climate science community that will last well beyond the project, in support of WCRP’s strategic objectives.

The AEIP builds a network of African and European stakeholders strengthening links between innovation ecosystems in an inclusive and collaborative manner, ensuring equal benefits. The AEIP will stimulate collaboration among stakeholders and institutions implementing other programmes, contributing to mutually beneficial partnerships. The focus will lie on launching new activities (linked to capacity-building, mobility opportunities, knowledge production and transfer, investment readiness and access to finance) based on an assessment of the needs of all target groups, including researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, incubators/accelerators, civil society, women and youth. These will be activated through a combination of virtual outreach and in-person stakeholder meetings as a forum for discussion. Sustainability will be built into the AEIP from the start by making sure that new activities are linked up and designed in such a way that they can be carried forward by AEIP members after the end of the Action. We aim to grow the AEIP further into a network of networks acting as a hub for the implementation of the short-term actions of the AU-EU Innovation Agenda, reinforcing existing initiatives rather than duplicating them. The Action has been designed to maximise societal, economic, and scientific impact by centring the Platform at the core as a forum where stakeholders convene for focussed and structured innovation cooperation. With the networks leveraged by the consortium partners and multiplier effect, our outcomes and impacts will be scalable. The AEIP will support the Agenda’s objective to strengthen Research and Innovation cooperation between the African and European Union, maximising the impact of funding and reinforcing interconnected innovation ecosystems, thus contributing to sustainable and inclusive development, economic growth and job creation.

The municipal wastewater in Europe contains a potential chemical energy of 87,500 GWh per year in its organic fraction, which is equivalent to the output of 12 large power stations. Due to the currently applied technologies and related energy loss at each process step, wastewater treatment in Europe today consumes instead the equivalent of more than 2 power stations. Many operators are thus targeting incremental energy efficiency towards energy neutrality, but recent studies have shown that with novel process schemes using existing technologies, sewage treatment plants could actually become a new source of renewable energy, without compromising the treatment performance. The project POWERSTEP aims at demonstrating such innovative concepts in first full scale references for each essential process step in order to design energy positive wastewater treatment plants with currently available technologies. The following processes will be demonstrated in 6 full-scale case studies located in 4 European countries: enhanced carbon extraction (pre-filtration), innovative nitrogen removal processes (advanced control, main-stream deammonification, duckweed reactor), power-to-gas (biogas upgrade) with smart grid approach, heat-to-power concepts (thermoelectric recovery in CHP unit, steam rankine cycle, heat storage concepts), and innovative process water treatment (nitritation, membrane ammonia stripping). These individual technology assessments will merge into integrative activities such as treatment scheme modelling and design, global energy and heat management, carbon footprinting, integrated design options, as well as extensive dissemination activities. POWERSTEP will demonstrate the novel concepts and design treatment schemes of wastewater treatment plants that will be net energy producers, paving the way towards large implementation of such approaches and quick market penetration and supporting the business plans of participating technology providers.