Resilience has become an important necessity for cities, particularly in the face of climate change. Mitigation and adaptation actions that enhance the resilience of cities need to be based on a sound understanding and quantification of the drivers of urban transformation and settlement structures, human and urban vulnerability, and of local and global climate change. Copernicus, as the means for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation (EO), is based on continuously evolving Core Services. A major challenge for the EO community is the innovative exploitation of the Copernicus products in dealing with urban sustainability towards increasing urban resilience. Due to the multidimensional nature of urban resilience, to meet this challenge, information from more than one Copernicus Core Services, namely the Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), the Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), the Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Emergency Management Service (EMS), is needed. Furthermore, to address urban resilience, the urban planning community needs spatially disaggregated environmental information at local (neighbourhood) and city scales. Such information, for all parameters needed, is not yet directly available from the Copernicus Core Services mentioned above, while several elements - data and products - from contemporary satellite missions consist valuable tools for retrieving urban environmental parameters at local scale. The H2020-Space project CURE (Copernicus for Urban Resilience in Europe) is a joint effort of 10 partners from 9 countries that synergistically exploits the above Copernicus Core Services to develop an umbrella cross-cutting application for urban resilience, consisting of individual cross-cutting applications for climate change adaptation/mitigation, energy and economy, as well as healthy cities and social environments, at several European cities. These cross-cutting applications cope with the required scale and granularity by also integrating or exploiting third-party data, in-situ observations and modelling. CURE uses DIAS (Data and Information Access Services) to develop a system capable of supporting operational applications and downstream services across Europe. The CURE system hosts the developed cross-cutting applications, enabling its incorporation into operational services in the future. CURE is expected to increase the value of Copernicus Core Services for future emerging applications in the domain of urban resilience, exploiting also the improved data quality, coverage and revisit times of the future satellite missions. Thus, CURE will lead to more efficient routine urban planning activities with obvious socioeconomic impact, as well as to more efficient resilience planning activities related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, resulting in improved thermal comfort and air quality, as well as in enhanced energy efficiency. The CURE impact is maximized by developing synergies with EuroGEOSS and Climate-KIC, as well as by exploring the conditions under which, specific CURE outcomes could be integrated into the operational Copernicus service portfolio. The added value and benefit expected to emerge from CURE is related to transformed urban governance and quality of life, because it is expected to provide improved and integrated information to city administrators, hence effectively supporting strategies for resilience planning at local and city scales, towards the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda for Europe.

Mineral wool within construction and demolition waste (CDW) is considered largely unrecyclable. It is formed at a rate of 2.5 Mt/year and although it is only 0.2 % of total CDW, it requires disproportionally large space due to low density. The WOOL2LOOP project aims to close this material loop by introducing novel technology and value chain to CDW sorting, pretreatment, and processing. The quality of sorted mineral wool is upgraded by comparing and combining the following approaches: pre-demolition audit, robotized demolition and sorting, novel on-site analysis with time-gated Raman spectroscopy, and smart demolition practices. Pre-treatment involves logistical considerations and milling of the mineral wool waste to sufficiently small particles. Processing utilizes alkali-activation (i.e., geopolymerization) technology to convert reactive silica and alumina of the mineral wool into new building material products. Alkali-activation in this context is a completely new approach and it enables to diversely adjust the resulting material properties. Therefore, a broad selection of products were selected for WOOL2LOOP, ranging from relatively low to high value products: hollow core and pavement slabs, facade elements, acoustic panels, dry concrete, floor screed and 3D-printing equipment, for instance. All the required technologies and product manufacturing cases will be demonstrated in large-scale pilots with a wide geographic coverage within the EU. The consortium includes several leading large construction material enterprises and innovative SMEs to cover the whole value chain. Safety, health, environmental, and economic aspects are considered throughout the project. According to the preliminary calculations, there is a strong business potential in the WOOL2LOOP concept. Finally, the constantly increasing landfilling costs (approx. 250 M€ for mineral wool in the EU) create a clear economic driver for the project.

NewSOL proposal addresses the specific challenge towards high efficiency solar energy harvesting by advance materials solutions and architectures that are in line with those specified in SET-plan. Its main objective is to develop advance materials solutions based on innovative storage media and concepts for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) up to validation in field of their performance by real time monitoring. This will be supported by an innovative thermal energy storage design based on the combination of new functional and advanced materials, like heat thermal fluid, sensible and latent energy storage media and insulating materials, into two innovative plant architectures: single tank thermocline storage and concrete type module. The main challenges of NewSOL are: Develop two new system Architectures: I) Thermocline Tank, (combining sensible and latent heat up to 550ºC), and II) Concrete module tank (sensible heat up to 550ºC). The scope to fulfil the challenges is to validate four new advance materials: 1) High thermal performance concrete (including carbon nanostructures), 2) Molten Salts (including nanoparticles), 3) PCMs, and 4) Filler Material re-usage. From the careful combination of the materials solutions within the two concept solutions six high relevant Impacts are expected: a) Reduced LCOE,10-12cEuro/kWh via higher material performance,b) New designs that enable a reduction of CAPEX and OPEX, c) Increase material understanding enabling long term performance,d)Deployment of high tech monitoring technologies included in the demo activities,e) Environmental re-usage of materials, and g) Through innovative materials, higher world market penetration of European materials supply sector. Moreover, investments foreseen at prototype level will be integrated into EMSP, part of the European Research Infrastructure Network, a research-enabling platform EU-Solaris, thus, NewSOL legacy will be a strength for the future of the European Renewable Energy Industry.