ABRACADABRA is based on the prior assumption that non-energy-related benefits play a key role in the deep renovation of existing buildings. In particular, ABRA actions will focus on the creation of a substantial increase of the real estate value of the existing buildings through a significant energy and architectural transformation. The central goals of the proposal consist of an important reduction of the pay back time of the interventions, a strengthening of the key investors’ confidence, increasing quality and attractiveness of the existing buildings’ stock and, finally, reaching a concrete market acceleration towards the Nearly Zero Energy Buildings target. The actual investment gap in the deep renovation sector is due to the fact that high investments are required up-front and they are generally characterised by an excessively high degree of risk and long payback times. It is therefore necessary to develop harmonized, concerted and innovative actions to unlock the needed public and private funds, fill the energy efficiency investment gap and ultimately contribute to re-launch the construction market and create new jobs. Therefore, ABRA aims at demonstrating to the key stakeholders and financial investors the attractiveness of a new renovation strategy based on AdoRe, intended as one (or a set of) Assistant Building unit(s) - like aside or façade addictions, rooftop extensions or even an entire new building construction - that adopt the existing buildings (the Assisted Buildings). The creation of these new Assistant Buildings’ Additions integrated with Renewable Energy Sources aims at reducing the initial investment allocated for the deep renovation of the existing building creating an up-grading synergy between old and new. The ABRA strategy results in the implementation of a punctual densification policy that has been proven capable of fostering the investments in deep renovation of the existing built environment throughout Europe

This project will develop a decision-support system (DSS) for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed and service-oriented approach that accounts for forecasted modifications in the hazard (e.g., climate change), vulnerability/resilience (e.g., aging structures and populations) and exposure (e.g., population decrease/increase). The primary deliverable from MEDiate will be a decision support framework in the form of service-orientated web tool and accompanying disaster risk management framework providing end users (local authorities, businesses etc) with the ability to build accurate scenarios to model the potential impact of their mitigation and adaptation risk management actions. The scenarios, which can be customised to reflect local conditions and needs (e.g., demographics, deprivation, natural resources etc), will be based on a combination of the historical record and future climate change projections to forecast the location and intensity of climate related disaster events and to predict their impacts, including cascading impacts, on the vulnerability of the local physical, economic and social systems. The scenarios will allow end users to evaluate the potential impact of different risk management strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance community resilience. The project will consist of analysis of relevant data and co-development with testbed decision-makers of a DSS to enable more reliable resilience assessments, accounting for risk mitigation and adaptive capabilities, to be made, therefore reducing losses (human, financial, environmental etc) from future climate-related and geophysical disasters. The project will involve a multi-disciplinary team of geophysical and meteorological scientists, risk engineers, social scientists, information technologists and end-users, working together to ensure that the system is user-led and supported by appropriate technology.

The ONEPlanET project aims to develop a common nexus modelling framework to simulate and evaluate pathways to define a more sustainable future in Africa through the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure. In this way, it will be possible to stimulate a green energy transition in the continent as well as a decarbonization of existing energy plants. The ONEPlanET model will be tailored to the needs of different stakeholders and end-users (public and private actors, policy and decision-makers, experts, and citizens) and will be totally open source to stimulate its future upgrades. The model will include information on Water, Energy, Food (WEF) and interlinkages with other sectors as Economy, Ecosystems, Society, Climate and Land for delivering a multi-sectoral assessment consistent with socio-economic and climate scenarios. The ONEPlanET modelling approach will integrate Earth Observation data (e.g., Copernicus, ESA or GEOSS), statistical data and information from basins to national and regional, via three representative case studies in the Songwe (Malawi/Tanzania), Inkomati-Usuthu (South Africa) and Niger (Nigeria) river basins, which show different types of basins and socio-ecological systems. ONEPlanET will help to better understand the interactions between Nexus sectors to deliver sound technical and policy recommendations towards the implementation of energy infrastructure to build a more climate neutral and resilient society.

The idea is to Build a Knowledge Base, that can be used to trace all activities related to the overall life-cycle of buildings. Since various directives of the EU are related to sustainability, resilience and energy efficiency of building stock, it is necessary to provide a marketplace where various actors can share their offers, including their quality certificates and credentials, and where it would be possible to log and trace every information, activity and change, and use the knowledge to improve sustainability. The project will extend a Digital Building LogBook (DBL), used by a municipality for the management and the administration of its huge set of buildings, with several available and novel data, tools and functionalities, by the help of a Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), an open source blockchain-based solution. DKG software will include specific building-related ontologies, so that the whole knowledge base about the life-cycle of the building can be logged and by that continuously updated, providing mechanisms and interfaces for the relevant stakeholders, to publish, trace, share, tokenize, end even trade models in a market economy. Such information integration can support decisions on optimal adaptation and intervention planning strategies for large populations of buildings. The DBL will be integrated with several new functionalities demonstrated on a dozen of use cases via easily accessible and publicly available APIs. These functionalities will assure a high interoperability between legacy systems and existing tools (e.g. BIM, HBIM), compliance with standards, providing automated warning and alerting system with the help of machine learning tools, digital twinning, and decision-making support. The new DBL based applications will be tested on pilot projects focusing on historical and critical buildings, and on building stocks. The project targets a smarter and more sustainable built environment of the EU providing new market and new value creation.

ZHENIT overall objective is to promote Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) as key and “ready-to-implement” solutions to achieve 2030 IMO/EU targets for shipping sector decarbonization. ZHENIT goal is to fully untap “on-board WH potential” developing and validating WHR solutions at different temperature levels towards the exploitation of WH for different on-board services (cooling, power, desalination) thus able to valorise heat in different vessel processes like: WH-to-Trigeneration via an innovative recuperated ORC integrated with an heat pumpt with ejector (T>100°C – NTUA); WH-to-Cooling and Desalination via an adsorption system (70