Industrial symbiosis promotes sharing of physical resources (energy, water, residues and recycled materials, etc.) between different industrial processes, increasing business opportunities and creating new jobs while reducing environmental impacts. Neither self-organization nor the few government co-ordinated mechanisms have delivered mass implementation of Industrial Symbiosis. Given the great potential for triple-bottom line benefits this failure must be understood and addressed. SCALER aims to massively increase the implementation of industrial symbiosis, by developing mechanisms to retain the embedded value of European resources, thus, enabling the circular economy to achieve higher resource efficiency through systemic innovations led by intensified industrial symbiosis initiatives and enhanced by cross-sectorial collaboration and, to support the development of a roadmap to improve the adoption of industrial symbiosis in the European process industry at regional / national / European level. SCALER will use new and advanced practices in identifying value opportunities, use new methods to create a larger market for available resources, and use new methods to measure and manage the implementation and sustaining of new relationships. SCALER brings together qualitative and quantitative tools and methods to support self-organised initiatives on industrial symbiosis and to enhance facilitation processes and coordination actions. The creation of new spaces for interaction, collaboration and cooperation and the engagement of a broader set of stakeholders are crucial elements of the multiplier effect in industrial symbiosis implementation. SCALER provides a comprehensive solution for understanding, assessing and intensifying the potential of industrial symbiosis in Europe.

Hubs for Circularity (H4C) are to be the European lighthouses of resource efficiency: through implementing best practice in industrial and urban symbiosis (I-US), the H4C are intended to achieve a step change in circular utilisation of resources and GHG emission reductions within given geographic areas. The European Community of Practice (ECoP) builds on and brings together ongoing work and expertise on H4C and I-US, initially supporting the H4C demonstrations funded under Horizon Europe. This project will develop both the ECoP network of stakeholders (commencing with funded H4C demo projects) together with an information and knowledge platform to enable stakeholders to take action. By creating awareness and fostering knowledge sharing between regions/cities and their industries, the H4C Platform will provide the tools and the evidence base for the approach to be adopted widely across Europe. A sustainable business model for deployment of the toolkit and services developed under the project will ensure the H4C ECoP is maintained well into the future. This consortium led by ISQ not only includes world leaders in the field (experienced in delivery, training, stakeholder engagement, models and methodologies) but also has the specific committed support and participation of many of the European bodies (those representing regions, cities, industry, educational institutions etc) that are needed to both disseminate the project outcomes and initiate implementation. Working closely with its sister consortium H4C-Europe, the H4C ECoP consortium is confident of delivering an ECoP and H4C platform that will achieve the target of greater circularity and carbon neutrality through profitable actions that also benefit communities/civil society.

AI and big data are fundamentally interwoven into our societies, culture and indeed into our expectations and conceptions of democratic governance and exchange. They can also, however, contribute to an environment for citizens that is distinctly anti-democratic. KT4D will harness the benefits of an understanding of these as knowledge technologies to foster more inclusive civic participation in democracy. To achieve this, we will develop and validate tools, guidelines and a Digital Democracy Lab demonstrators platform. These results will be validated across three user needs scenarios: 1) building capacity for citizens and citizen-facing Civil Society Organisations (CSOs); 2) creating regulatory tools and services for Policy and CSOs; and 3) improving awareness of how to design ethically and mindfully for democracy principles in academic and industrial software development. Our work is underpinned by the understanding that to fully address the social and fundamental rights costs of AI and big data, we need more than just technological fixes, we need more than just technological fixes, we need to address the underlying cultural influences and barriers. Most importantly, we understand the threats to democracy of AI and big data not only through the nature of what they do, but via the cultural disruptions they create with power dynamics they shift, their tendency toward opacity, and the speed at which they change. KT4D’s ambitious and disruptive results will drive transformation in how democracy and civic participation are facilitated in the face of rapidly changing knowledge technologies, enabling actors across society to capitalise on the many benefits these technologies can bring in terms of community empowerment, social integration, individual agency, and trust in both institutions and technological instruments, while confidently mitigating potential ethical, legal and cultural risks.

Many policy decisions in contemporary knowledge-based forms of governance are driven by advice, evidence and data provided by experts from diverse arenas. In democratic societies, trust in the provenance and justification of policy measures are essential for their implementation. The rise of populist politics with its anti-elitist mantra has brought the trustworthiness of experts and their areas of expertise into question. PEriTiA brings together philosophers, social and natural scientists, policy experts, ethicists, psychologists, media specialists and civil society organisations to conduct a comprehensive multi-disciplinary investigation of trust in and the trustworthiness of policy related expert opinion. The investigation is carried out in three - theoretical, empirical and ameliorative – phases with the goal of illuminating a topic that has been the subject of much political commentary and media debate in recent years. The key hypothesis explored conceptually and tested empirically is that affective and normative factors play a central role in decisions to trust, even in cases where judgements of trustworthiness may seem to be grounded in epistemic considerations, such as professional reputation, reliability and objectivity. The most ambitious feature of the current project is the application of its theoretical and empirical findings to active attempts at establishing trust, where warranted, between the general public and actors with a central role in the decision-making processes of governance. Our ultimate aim is to provide tools and discover indicators which can be used in measuring and establishing the trustworthiness of the agents involved in social and political decision making. The use of climate change and climate science as a test case in exploring the social, ethical and psychological indicators of trustworthiness is expected to help to construct trust-enhancing narratives regarding the role of science in governance.

AI-TranspWood ambition is to create an AI-driven multiscale methodology for new Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD), and functional wood-based composites and demonstrate the concept for Transparent Wood (TW), a promising composite with potential applications in several industrial fields, such as construction, automotive, electronics and furniture. By developing AI supported SSbD framework for TW, we contribute to European Green Deal by providing innovative sustainable materials and cost-effective tools for European industries paving the way towards green and sustainable transition. SSbD tools used by the chemicals and materials community with new transparent wood materials, increases the innovation capacity of SMEs and industry for future sustainable products. With the help of AI-tools and advanced experiments we develop multiscale models from the atomistic scale to continuum for the manufacturing process and the mechanics of the transparent wood allowing for virtual screening of bio-sourced alternatives for hazardous and petrochemical-based chemicals required for manufacturing Transparent Wood using the current solutions. The built computational models are openly shared within the European environment for scientific software (EESSI). The user-friendly surrogate model is also made available in the VTT Modeling Factory environment, along with an LCA tool, for industrial use. Four TW business cases are conducted, with the aim to be commercialized in the construction, automotive, electronics and furniture industries. The SSbD framework will guide the whole creation of the TW products providing a competitive advantage to the European manufacturers interested in introducing the TW composites in the European market, also as substitutes of glass and plastic in various applications. This can considerably increase the European share in the global production of sustainable TW composites.