This proposal seeks to enhance the capabilities of the EU for implementing conflict prevention and peacebuilding interventions through sustainable, comprehensive and innovative civilian means. It intends to address some of the dilemmas and paradoxes of external interventions that aim for local ownership in third countries, by exploring principles, processes and tools that can enhance EU capabilities. This will be achieved through the project’s Review, Reflect, Recommend and Innovate objectives. ‘Review’ will assess past and ongoing conflict prevention and peacebuilding initiatives of the EU and its partners, focusing on three types of EU interventions: multi-track diplomacy, security sector reform, and governance reform. The assessment will be based on field research in Georgia, Mali, Ukraine and Yemen, and desk reviews looking beyond these countries. ‘Reflect’ will create a ‘community of practice’ providing forums for dialogue that will bring together policymakers, civilian and military practitioners, academic experts and beneficiaries of EU interventions. These will validate and apply the evidence base by focusing on cross-cutting themes: local ownership, gender, multi-stakeholder coherence, civil-military synergies and ICTs. ‘Recommend’ will elaborate the project findings into a tailored set of recommendations and enhance their impact through direct policy engagement and an international dissemination strategy. ‘Innovate’ will contribute significantly to civilian conflict prevention and peacebuilding by identifying research priorities and tools, and enhancing the potential of ICTs. The project Whole-of-Society Approach to Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding is a conscious attempt to address the relationships of peacebuilding actors within a wider cultural and institutional context. It deals with issues of coordination, synergies and inclusivity of peacebuilding efforts, where diverse stakeholders have a role to play in the process.

Restoring and maintaining the resilience of the Black Sea ecosystem, while enabling a sustainable exploitation of its natural resources is vital. A better coordination and alignment of research and innovation efforts alongside developing improved knowledge base and joint infrastructures could substantially support this timely challenge. Towards this end the Burgas Vision Paper was produced, by an initiative supported by EC, as the key framework document for a shared vision for a productive, healthy, resilient, sustainable and better-valued Black Sea by 2030. It addresses the four key pillars on which a new Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and its Implementation Plan can be built on: (1) Addressing fundamental Black Sea research challenges, (2) Developing products, solutions and clusters underpinning Black Sea Blue Growth, (3) Building of critical support systems and innovative Infrastructures, (4) Education and capacity building. Building on this recently emerging policy framework, the core contribution of the Black Sea CONNECT CSA will be to scientifically, technically and logistically support the Black Sea Blue Growth Initiative towards the implementation of the Burgas Vision Paper, with a view on boosting the blue economy in the region. The overall objective is to coordinate the development of the SRIA and its implementation plan both at national and regional level. The SRIA and its implementation plan will guide stakeholders from academia, funding agencies, industry, policy and society to address together the fundamental Black Sea challenges, to promote blue growth and economic prosperity of the Black Sea region, to build critical support systems and innovative research infrastructure and to improve education and capacity building. The project will support the design of synergistic activities such as developing an operational network of funders, new transnational joint activities and achieving the knowledge transfer.

The main goals of the EffectFact proposal are a) to advance pure and applied mathematics in the area of factorisation techniques, Wiener-Hopf and Riemann-Hilbert problems and related numerical techniques to solve time dependent boundary value problems in complex discrete and continuous domains; b) to utilize the developed techniques to solve challenging problems from: i) biomechanics (DNA replication), ii) medicine (surgical resection and dentistry), iii) metamaterials (acoustic and gyro-elastic), iv) AI (machine learning), v) environmental and civil engineering (with a focus on earthquake and coastal defences) and, in doing so, c) to establish a new, sustainable, EU-centred network of researchers from different sectors and disciplines, united by their dedication to furthering the projects techniques and results, while transferring this knowledge, best practice and creating new training opportunities for EU researchers. The EffectFact consists of 24 Partners: 9 Academic Institutions from the EU (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland), 6 Universities from the AC (Georgia, Israel, Norway and Ukraine); 8 highly innovative SMEs adopting completely different R&D strategies (UK, Switzerland, France, Slovenia, Israel, Slovakia); 1 Academic Partners from the TCs (China). All EffectFact goals align with the RISE Objectives, establishing a unique consortium to fill gaps in several scientific disciplines, impacting H2020 priorities and Horizon Europe missions. These problems could not be solved independently, requiring continuous feedback from analytic, applied and computational researchers from numerous disciplines. This diverse collaborative Network will forge interdisciplinary links within the EU, strengthen the access of EU academics and SME’s to international research, lead to tangible and impactful results, while building a strong base of robust, independent researchers capable of furthering the aims of EffectFact long into the future.