There are large knowledge gaps around the governance of the low carbon energy system transition in a smooth and participative way, ensuring that citizens are at the centre of the required fundamental transformation and enabling the full efflorescence of their creative potential. Social innovation is a prime way to tap into that potential while Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs), a social innovation in itself, are a prime way to mobilize people and to ensure the acceptance for and participation in the necessary transition process. However, both social innovation and CAIs lack proper scientific and field-tested understanding of their development and factors for success. As of today, the role of citizen-driven CAIs (e.g. energy communities, cooperatives, purchasing groups) and their contribution to the energy transition has neither been quantified at an aggregate level, nor has their contribution potential been estimated or understood in sufficient depth. The COMETS project aims to fill these knowledge gaps by quantifying the European-wide aggregate contribution of CAIs to the energy transition at national and European levels by investigating their evolution and scaling up at an in-depth level in six selected countries. The main expected impacts of the project are two-fold. Firstly, COMETS will advance the scientific knowledge on the motives, desires, objectives and barriers of such collective action initiatives and their historical and future role in the energy transition. Building on the information gathered and tested for its robustness, we will then co-develop and test supportive tools together with CAI members, decision makers and the scientific community. Lastly, these stakeholders will then be able to exploit the main outputs of COMETS, namely a Supporting Platform for CAIs, the enhanced knowledge base, scenarios and roadmaps for spreading CAI models, even after the project is concluded.

The GROW Observatory (GROW) will create a sustainable citizen platform and community to generate, share and utilise information on land, soil and water resource at a resolution hitherto not previously considered. The vision is to underpin smart and sustainable custodianship of land and soil, whilst meeting the demands of food production, and to answer a long-standing challenge for space science, namely the validation of soil moisture detection from satellites. GROW is highly innovative project leveraging and combining low cost consumer sensing technology, a simple soil test and a large user base of growers and plant enthusiasts to contribute individual soil and land data. It is designed to engage primarily individual growers and small-scale farmers across Europe, and to enable them to develop new wisdom and innovative practices through the collective power of shared and open data and knowledge. Citizens contributing data will gain access to the first single-source comprehensive crop and watering advice service for individual and small-scale growers incorporating scientific and crowdsourced information. Moreover, they will develop ‘campaigns’ (coordinated sampling operations) around local needs and issues, to underpin smarter decision-making and implementation of policy objectives. GROW will actively identify and enable new and credible social and business innovation processes, creating potential new services, applications and markets. The outcome will be a central hub of open knowledge and data created and maintained by growers that will be of value to the citizens themselves as well as specialist communities in science, policy and industry. The GROW partnership will connect and scale to globally dispersed communities linked through digital and social platforms, and a wide range of additional citizen associations and NGOs in sustainable agriculture, gardening, food democracy and land management.

CONTEXT & BACKGROUNDThe project has been designed within a context that includes:• The widely agreed general need for massive levels of transformative change to achieve a sustainable low carbon future, and the more specific wide interest in and need for community-based climate action.• The development and sharing of innovation and good practice in learning about and demonstrating sustainable, low carbon living• The importance of transformative learning to create climate-positive behaviour change, for individuals and communities• The emergence of blended learning methods and systems, which can enable massive affordable accessibility and linking this to experiential learning for deep engagement, and inner and outer transformationOBJECTIVESSpecific project objectives are:1. To develop a system to train, support and enable Community Climate Coaches (CCC) across Europe, and to work toward ensuring this role is deeply embedded in the climate response and sustainability movements2. To capture, formalise and disseminate the experience and innovation of the partners and wider stakeholders through intellectual outputs and a structured dissemination programme3. To support the development and mapping of new and existing community climate initiatives and education systems in Europe4. To expand and strengthen learning and collaboration with partners in and beyond our movement5. To develop a CCC support system that enables a better understanding of the positive impacts and benefits arising from climate action education, for learning participants, local communities and the climateAchieving these objectives aims to bring about massive personal and community-led change over time, in response to the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement and related goals.PARTICIPANTS16 people will engage in core CCC project meetings, with 200 in-person attendees of multiplier events, and a target of 200+ on-line participants. 42 people will be engaged in in-person CCC training, with at least as many participating in online training. Dissemination activities across the partnership’s extensive networks will benefit many thousands of people, by giving them access to and use of the CCC project outputs. The CCC project participants are composed of a mix of people from larger networks of community-led initiatives and smaller adult education providers. They have complementary domains of expertise (including community resilience, social innovation, collaborative and asynchronous working, online learning) and most have long-term collaborative engagement with each other through ECOLISE.ACTIVITIESThe project activities will produce 5 inter-related Intellectual Outputs, linked Training and Multiplier events that are designed to generate deep, long-lasting benefits for the partners and particularly for the wider partnerships, network and collaborations these partners are engaged with. The project activities include online and Transnational Project meetings through which partners will progress the tasks to deliver the project outputs, project evaluation, and extensive dissemination to ensure wide and ongoing take-up of the project’s outputs.METHODOLOGY: COMMUNITY FACILITATION AND BLENDED LEARNINGThe project will train, build, map and gather data on climate action through a Community of Practice for continuous peer support that will sustain and extend collective learning, and nurture sharing of innovations amongst Community Climate Coaches. Blended learning methods will optimise the advantages of in-person and online learning to achieve Transformative Learning for the Coaches and their communities, with specialised knowledge, good practice and innovations shared online. The participants will engage with an online peer group as they progress their local-to-regional initiatives as the pioneers and facilitators of change, with peers providing confirmation and support, which maintains behaviour change. Participating in face-to-face training enhances the online learning by increasing the identification with the group and embodying individual and social learning experiences more deeply.RESULTS, IMPACT & LONG-TERM BENEFITSThe project results will enable a growing network of Community Climate Coaches to deliver highly accessible and affordable transformative learning and action for individuals and communities at scale. It will deliver the new role of Community Climate Coach, that pilots and develops methodologies for maximising effective community engagement with a set of tools and good practice that deliver significant carbon reductions. The impact will be that Europe's communities will be set up to have access to high quality transformative learning and community facilitation that will help bringing about significant shifts to sustainable low carbon lifestyles and communities.

UrbanA takes up the challenge of synthesizing and brokering the knowledge and experience generated in EU-funded projects, many of which have identified interventions that address grand societal challenges, of which urban inequalities and social exclusion across different contexts. In this way, UrbanA will support city-makers – including researchers, policymakers and practitioners – in transforming European cities into inclusive and sustainable urban and peri-urban environments. UrbanA will do so through a transdisciplinary Urban Arena for Sustainable and Equitable Solutions (established in WP2). By co-creatively mapping urban sustainability interventions (WP3), assessing their potential to improve urban social equity and inclusion (WP4) and identifying potential avenues and agents by which such interventions could be transferred to more widespread governance contexts (WP5), UrbanA will develop actionable and actor specific solutions (WP6), which will be disseminated to key local and European actors (WP7).

Climate change, economic inequality and social divisions urgently require innovative responses at multiple levels. The Paris Agreement, UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and Europe 2020 Strategy demonstrate substantial will at national and international levels to tackle these challenges, although actual implementation can be difficult and slow. At the local level though, there is a vibrant movement of community-led initiatives on climate change and sustainability. These Community-Led Initiatives (CLIs) are transformative social innovations that involve new ways of being, organising, negotiating and acting. There are thousands of such initiatives across Europe, from ecovillages to community energy cooperatives, social enterprises to zero-waste initiatives. Several recent transnational research projects have highlighted that the prospects for rapid transitions to sustainability are highest where municipal authorities collaborate with community-led initiatives. A 2018 paper from the European Economic and Social Committee on ‘Boosting climate actions by non-State actors’ reflects this growing recognition also at EU and global levels, and in February 2018, the Council of the EU for the first time acknowledged the critical role of local communities in addressing climate challenges. It is to fully leverage this potential, that the Ecovillage Transition in Action project and its outputs were designed. In our networks we see examples of engaged rural communities working for positive change who feel unsupported by local government. We also see many municipalities with positive goals and a determination to act, who are struggling to build genuinely collaborative relationships with local citizens and initiatives. We therefore aim to provide open and innovative education and materials designed to support both educators and adult learners develop key competences in cross-sectoral partnership building, community building, participatory design and collaboration between local authorities, communities and citizens in primarily rural areas. We wish to: - Grow the capacity of educators, local initiatives, local authorities, citizens and and community organisers to facilitate this crucial but complicated collaboration, and to teach those skills and capacities to others. - Provide accessible and transferable educational tools, trainings, curricula, and methods for bringing together CLIs and local government actors, and increase the depth and quality of collaboration between them. - Create and prototype a set of replicable trainings that support our target groups to acquire key competencies and skills for what we call Ecovillage Transition - a process where municipal authorities and local citizens work together to develop alternative pathways to local development, based on a holistic framework of social, cultural, economic and ecological regeneration. Through an inventory of good practice, successful examples and challenges in collaboration between local governments and community-led initiatives in rural locations, we will create an Ecovillage Transition Toolkit integrating practical experience and research – designed to foster partnership, engagement and participatory, holistic local development.A central element of the project is the development of new curricula for Ecovillage Transition, as well as a Training of Trainers module – both providing innovative materials and pedagogies for community-led initiatives, local authorities, educators and active citizens to work together for positive impactFinally, our Ecovillage Transition Tracker will combine elements of impact assessment, design thinking and participatory monitoring and evaluation. It aims to provide local initiatives and authorities with an innovative and practical framework and collaborative methodology for tracking the ongoing implementation of multi-stakeholder projects in ways that ensure dynamic steering, ongoing learning, and goals that matter to local communities. The EU-funded TESS research project noted that if 5 % of EU citizens engaged in community-led climate mitigation initiatives, 85% of EU-28 countries would achieve their 2020 emissions targets. TESS also highlighted the awareness raising, social cohesion, creation of local livelihoods and wealth retention, and the feeling of empowerment that citizens experience by working together to bring about change - and that 63% of the surveyed CLIs have been replicated elsewhere. Inspired, we aim to contribute to- rapidly scaling and spreading the type of innovative, sustainable and inclusive local solutions and impact already implemented by ecovillages and other community-led initiatives. - increased capacity for partnership-building and collaboration between CLIs and municipalities across Europe.- the development of innovative education for sustainable local development, capable of increasing collective capacity to take direct action to achieve the UN SDGs and climate agreements