<< Background >>The world oceans and seas represent an incredible interconnected natural system that relies on a delicate balance. Nowadays, this equilibrium is threatened by several problems, such as overfishing and trawling, ocean acidification, rising sea levels and the dumping of chemicals and debris into the oceans and seas. Plastic waste, in particular, represents a real challenge. Given its long lifespan and the fact that it can hurt or be absorbed by the flora and fauna, it poses a threat to humans as well.Among the sectors that contribute to marine pollution, the fishery and aquaculture sectors play a major role. Used nets, traps and longlines end up abandoned floating or at the bottom of the seas for years, while hurting the ecosystem.For the islands located in Southern Europe, such as those belonging to the Macaronesia region and to the Mediterranean Sea, a good relationship with their sea is essential for their sustenance. In fact, the blue economy represents an important part of life for most of their communities.Given the necessity to preserve the marine ecosystems and not spoil the fragile economy of these communities, the project plans to address several needs:-contrasting the abandonment of fishing gear,-empowering local fishery and aquaculture workers in defending their own local marine ecosystem,-providing lifelong learning opportunities to islander communities,-supporting municipal employees in charge of environmental protection in overcoming barriers and helping fishery and aquaculture workers in adopting sustainable solutions,-increasing the awareness of the public and of relevant stakeholders.<< Objectives >>Through the implementation of the project, it will be possible to contribute to the reduction of marine debris that derives from fishery and aquaculture practices on islands located in the South of Europe, and preserve the local marine ecosystem.To contribute to this goal, the project will aim to enhance the knowledge of fishery and aquaculture workers from islands of Southern Europe on sustainability themes and improve their skills in adopting more sustainable practices in their working activities. By empowering these workers that have built a unique relationship with the sea, they will become aware of their role in preserving the ecosystem and adopt sustainable solutions that will address marine debris. The project, in addition, will provide them with lifelong opportunities that otherwise will not be available in remote geographical areas.The project will also support the role of municipal employees in charge of environmental protection from islands of Southern Europe in enhancing their skills as trainers for their local fishery and aquaculture workers on the implementation of sustainable solutions in these sectors. They will enhance the dialogue between parties and support the change in behaviours of these workers by leveraging the relationship of trust that exists between workers and their communities. Moreover, the municipal employees will be able to retain the gained knowledge and keep training other fishery and aquaculture workers over time.Finally, the project will aim to increase the awareness of European citizens, local communities and stakeholders on the role of fishery and aquaculture activities in the pollution of the Mediterranean Sea and of the Macaronesia region. In particular, young people and policy makers will be targeted by the dissemination activities through the project results.<< Implementation >>Several activities are proposed to be implemented during the project.First, the project will develop a transnational report where the attitudes and knowledge of fishery and aquaculture workers to adopt sustainable solutions will be presented. It will also present the insight of municipal employees that deal with environmental issues and members of Ministries of the environment regarding obstacles and needs for better sustainability services in the partner countries.The project will collect best practices from other EU countries to explore possible existing or proposed solutions and will develop training materials for both target groups in all partner languages. The project intends to design and deploy an e-learning platform that will provide participants with information, tools and resources to support and enhance education delivery and management. Once the platform is completed, it will be tested by running two pilot tests, one for each participating target group. Municipal employees will be trained by the project staff to acquire the skills necessary to become local instructors. Successively, the participating fishery and aquaculture workers will be trained by the trained municipal employees with the supervision and support of the involved project staff.To disseminate the project outcomes and results to the youth, a series of podcasts will be recorded per participating country. The partners will take part in defining the podcast content and selecting the most appropriate candidate among experts in the sector to be guests such as experts in blue economy, circular economy, environmental protection, sustainability, regional development etc. The podcast series will be broadcast live on free online radio, recorded and freely available for the general public.Finally, partners will develop a set of policy recommendations concerning ocean sustainability. During this activity, they will collect all the valuable lessons learned during the project implementation and present a set of suggestions that can support national authorities in addressing marine litter.Throughout the entire project duration, various activities related to the dissemination of the project outcomes and results will be carried out through the partnership’s local networks and online presence.<< Results >>The project will deliver several results during its implementation.First, a Transnational report will summarize the attitudes and knowledge of fishery and aquaculture workers with respect to innovative sustainable approaches in the sector. It will also outline the main concerns and obstacles that the municipalities are facing in adopting these practices.It will be followed by the design a training program that will address the participating municipal employees in becoming trainers (through a train-the-trainer approach) and will support the participating fishery and aquaculture workers in adopting sustainable practices in their working activities.An e-learning platform will be designed and deployed to provide the participating target groups with a complete learning experience, to maximize their learning outcomes, and to offer access to the project results and information to relevant stakeholders and to the general public.In order to raise awareness and attract the attention of European public and youth concerned with ocean sustainability the partnership will record and broadcast a podcast series of 15 episodes in each country where experts in the field of sustainability will provide interesting and informative informationFinally, Policy recommendation for the establishment of marine litter stations in ports of the European Islands will be drafted to showcase the benefits of this method in sea protection. The Policy recommendation will also include the lessons learned by the partnership throughout the project implementation.

SmartShip aims to bring together Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of focused Universities, Research Institutions and Companies oriented into the maritime sector in order to build a holistic integrated ICT-based framework for the sustainable, individualized and completely automated energy management of ships. To accomplish this, it will take advantage of all the know-how that the consortium brings to the project referring to ICT technologies such as Data Analytics, IoT exploitation, DSS use, visualization tools, optimization algorithms and tools and Circular Economy approach methods. Smartship aims to offer a multi-layer optimization in the fields of fuel consumption, energy efficiency and emissions control management, in full respect to the implementation of the requirements of maritime sector regulations and taking into account applications of circular economy concepts in the maritime as well. Knowledge exchange between the partners that are already involved in the maritime sector, the ICT technology industry partners and the academia partners is one of the major Smartship’s objectives and will be materialised through corresponding secondments during the whole project’s timeplan. These synergies aim to build stronger collaboration relationships between the partners with respect to their future exploitation beyond Smartship project. Summing up Smartship will capitalise on available COTS technologies and will deliver an ICT & IoT-enabled holistic cloud-based maritime performance & monitoring system, for the entire lifecycle of a ship, aimed to optimise energy efficiency, emissions reduction and fuel consumption, whist introducing circular economy concepts in the maritime field.

AGRARIAN will focus on the design of an open and highly dynamic environment (TRL 5-7) with respect to the tools, reuse, composability and orchestration so as to enable tailored open-source digital solutions that will enhance sustainability performance and competitiveness of the agricultural sector. AGRARIAN will leverage mature and sophisticated technologies addressing the requirements of different workloads through a new programming environment and tools for the automated refactoring of existing and/or new applications and data management frameworks enabling them to operate in edge-based deployments as well as new edge-native programming abstractions and middleware. Based on widely accepted open source technologies and adoption of container-based technologies and orchestrators, AGRARIAN platform aims to offer: Smart connectivity for secure access to any of the relevant network infrastructure options; Ability to dynamically meet latency, configuration and other requirements of each of the different network technologies; Integration of edge and cloud for a transparent infrastructure to organize and deploy software components on demand; Uniform management of distributed digital infrastructure for different edge types, cloud components and services; Dynamic deployment and provisioning of services and applications that are time- and location-dependent; Management of data to maintain data security and optimize data processing; Optimisation of operations in terms of energy consumption by enabling new tools and apps for field operations and resource use; The proposed AGRARIAN environment will enable the development of new tools and apps for the agriculture by improving operational effectiveness and efficiency through real- time data processing. A strong ADSS (Agricultural Decision Support System) tool will be developed taking into consideration all specificities of farmers in rural communities enabling end users and stakeholders and maximize their benefit.

PANTHEON will design and develop a Community based Digital Ecosystem for Disaster Resilience utilising Smart City Digital Twin (SCDT) technology and leveraging new and emerging technologies and innovations to improve risk assessment, reduce vulnerability, and building community disaster resilience. The aim is to enhance the operational capabilities of CBDRM (community based DRM) teams, by: a community based smart city digital twin environment with components used for simulations, training and evaluation of the behaviour of sub-systems, threats and human factor; an early Detection and Situational awareness environment enabling authorities and FR and SR (first and second) even in complex, remote and demanding locations; an integrated intelligent subsystem, by the utilization collaborative sensing from earth observations and swarms of UAVs optimized to autonomously perform UAV-assisted operations throughout all disaster phases. PANTHEON platform and technologies will be combined with IoT infrastructure, multi-source data (satellite and in situ data, social networks, historical data) to create a tool for assessment of risks, vulnerability and capacity assessment; disseminate and inform decision makers and the public for risks during disasters; engage citizens and stakeholders in the disaster resilience building and share knowledge and best practices; identify vulnerabilities and implement policies, strategies and plans to eliminate future disaster costs; enhance collaboration among people at the local level; promote the conduct of comprehensive surveys on multi-hazard disaster risks and the development of regional disaster risk assessments and maps, including climate change scenarios; promote and enhance, through international cooperation, including technology transfer, access to and the sharing and use of non-sensitive data and information; SCDT will enable collective community behavior into the assessments of exposure to urban multi-hazards across time and space.

Climate change impacts are here and now. The impacts on people, prosperity and planet are already pervasive but unevenly distributed, as stated in the new EU Blueprint strategy (European Commission-EC, 2019). To reduce climate-related risks, the EC and the IPCC agree that transformational adaptation is essential. The TranformAr project aims to develop and demonstrate products and services to launch and accelerate large-scale and disruptive adaptive process for transformational adaptation in vulnerable regions and communities across Europe. The 6 TransformAr lighthouse demonstrators face a common challenge: water-related risks and impacts of climate change. Based on existing successful initiatives, the project will develop, test and demonstrate solutions and pathways, integrated in Innovation Packages, in 6 territories. Transformational pathways, including an integrated risk assessment approach are co-developed by means of 9 Transformational Adaptive Blocks. A set of 22 tested actionable adaptive solutions are tested and demonstrated, ranging from nature-based solutions, innovative technologies, financing, insurance and governance models, awareness and behavioral change solutions. The project team, led by the University of Antwerp, gathers 22 partners from 11 countries and a well-balanced mix of sectoral and adaptation experts (5 RTOs and 1 SME), paired with 6 territories (4 local authorities and 2 charities), 8 additional solutions providers and 1 EU water-related NPO specialized that will support to structure a European Community of practice. Massive resilience increase and acceleration of transformation adaptation will be fostered by clustering various investors, testing bankable solutions, and defining viable (non-)commercial exploitation strategy for the TransformAr solutions, products and services.