New and shared mobility services have shown that they have the potential to meet urban dweller’s needs while at the same time bring about a more rational use of cars. However, in order to succeed at delivering ‘’Mobility As a Service’’ and address the challenges that cities face, high-quality, user centric, and reliable new mobility solutions need to be offered as a credible alternative to the private car, coupled with safe and integrated infrastructure.

New solutions should be explored and deployed for newly designed or existing transport infrastructure to accommodate new and shared mobility services. Mobility services that could be considered are, for example: micro mobility, including bike/scooter sharing, demand responsive transport, carpooling or car sharing. The services deployed should enable the idea of a social optimum in mobility from several perspectives (including socio-economic, environmental, health, accessibility; gender and inclusion; and safety and security aspects) while considering the implications for transport infrastructure and urban design.

– Congestion and air pollution reduction, reduced road risk, social inclusion, accessibility in each city
– New and shared mobility services
– Designing transport infrastructure
– Policy research

Introduction

Demand side solutions and improved energy efficiency are among the most cost effective ways to support the transition to climate neutrality, reduce pollution and raw materials use, to create inclusive growth and employment in Europe, to bring down costs for consumers, to reduce our import dependency and redirect investments towards smart and sustainable infrastructure. The transition to a decentralised and climate neutral energy system will greatly benefit from the use of digital technologies which will enable buildings and industrial facilities to become inter-active elements in the energy system by optimising energy consumption, distributed generation and storage and vis-à-vis the energy system. They will also trigger new business opportunities and revenue streams for up-graded, innovative energy services which valorise energy savings and flexible consumption.

Scope

– Enhance the collection and quality of energy and related (e.g. life cycle) data for buildings through various sources.
– Explore approaches to integrate dynamic data from buildings (e.g. coming from sensors) with metering static data, statistical data, and other types of data .
– Ensure the proposed approaches build on interoperability and cloud-based solutions that and allow for seamless collection and use of data from the buildings, systems and subsystems.
– Develop new or enhance existing open source data analytics dashboards and prediction tools.
– Develop improved tools for digital simulation and digital twinning.
– Develop, enhance and integrate existing open data sharing platforms, including where relevant by refining and integrating building data reference architectures and making links with relevant data spaces.
– Contribute to the development of open access and standardised European buildings data repositories, also supporting the development of related EU initiatives.
– Promote fair data management practices to ensure findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usability of data.
– Seek to ensure from the design phase that the project is developed with a view to integrate its results/deliverables under a digital building logbook.
– Demonstrate digital data exchange platforms for building. The solutions should be interoperable and able to interact with grid management platforms.
– Demonstrate real use cases with business potential (e.g. smart energy services) valorising high quality building performance data,.
– Demonstrate that the proposed solutions allow to significantly improve the monitoring of the building stock performance, taking into consideration all relevant aspects (e.g. environmental, economic, and social ones).

Objectives

– More robust, improved and consistent monitoring of performance (energy and other relevant aspects, such as indoor environment quality and life cycle) of buildings across the European sectors and through the whole value chain.
– Better informed planning of building infrastructure and better informed investment decision-making for designing future buildings and building processes.
– Successfully tested smart energy services on the basis of advanced, high-quality building stock performance data.
– Significant and measurable increase in the use of open, real-time and reliable building data from multiple sources.
– Development of accurate methods that facilitate collection of data from the building stock.
– Better availability of big data and big data analysis facilities for real-life scale research, simulation and policy-making.
– More effective implementation of EU policies that drive the transition to a green, digital and sustainable economy, and contribute to enhance the quality of the building stock across the board (e.g. quality of life and working, inclusiveness and accessibility, etc.).

Emerging technologies lead to the increased appearance of threats that are difficult to detect and track due to their low radar cross-section (RCS) (e.g., stealth technologies), manoeuvring characteristics (e.g., hypersonic weapon systems, slow- moving airborne units) or saturation attack tactics. Facing such a wide spectrum of threats (in terms of variation of speed, angle of approach and altitude), existing surveillance systems are reaching their limits in terms of detection range, angular domain coverage, and tracking capabilities.

Development of electronig components and their integration that help to accomplish:
-improved size/weight/power ratios through miniaturisation and system integration
-integration of new technologies to increase the system’s adaptability to environments and operational scenarios
-demonstration of agile and precise radar beam steering and detection performance

-Agile digital beamforming to optimise observation time, volume coverage and detection reliability
-System characteristics such as wide or ultra-wide band coverage, low noise, high coherence
-Software defined waveforms with high degree of flexibility and use of multiple bands
-Data processing functions to enhance detection performance, target recognition and classification, notably with respect to new threats

Introduction

Agroecology can provide an important contribution to achieving these objectives, while at the same time enhancing food and nutrition security, thus contributing to achieving the objectives of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies and the Sustainable Development Goals. Agroecology is a holistic approach that relies on and maximizes the use of ecological processes to support agricultural production. By working more with nature and ecosystem services, agroecology has the potential to increase the circularity, diversification and autonomy of farms, and drive a full transformation of farming systems, from input substitution and beyond.

Scope

– Improve knowledge of the contribution of agroecological practices to climate change mitigation, increased adaptation of farming to climate change, and preservation and enhancement of biodiversity
– Indentify, evaluate and deliver a method that allows identification of the optimal combinations of agroecological practices and the most suitable agroecological strategies that efficiently contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation
– Improve existing indicators and develop new ones where relevant, to monitor and measure the qualitative and quantitative impacts of these strategies
– Develop tools to identify and monitor both the implementation of agroecological practices in farm management and the full-farm agroecological approaches
– Undertake an analysis of the social, environmental and economic sustainability performance of such strategies and analyse the potential to integrate such practices in business cases at farm level

Objectives

– Increased and robust evidence of the potential of agroecology for climate change
– Qualitative and quantitative data availability of the social, economic and environmental sustainability and performance of agroecological strategies
– Increased understanding, adoption and implementation of agroecological practices by farmers
– Improved understanding of the definition of agroecology with regard to the European context and of its application to European farming

Intro

Agroforestry systems include both traditional and modern land-use systems where trees are managed together with crops and/or animal production systems in agricultural settings. These systems have the potential to increase ecosystem services -including soil carbon sequestration, water retention, erosion control, soil nutrients, pollination, pest- and disease-control – and biodiversity, while improving farming productivity, profitability and sustainability of farmers’ incomes. Implementation of agroforestry in Europe needs to be boosted in order to maximise this potential.

Scope

– Design agroforestry systems for climate change
– Develop methods and indicators for agroforestry systems
– Develop models and tools adapted to real farm conditions
– Enhance quantification of the contribution of agroforestry to ecosystem services underpinning climate change and to increased biodiversity
– Improve knowledge of the economic, environmental and social performance of agroforestry systems and their contribution to sustainable food and feed / non-food biomass production
– Develop a model to measure the impact of policies on agroforestry
– Design and implement a plan to boost networking and R&I support to agroforestry at regional level
– Develop a training package and guidelines to support farmers in designing business plans linked to value chain development

Objective

– Improved qualitative and quantitative data availability of the contribution of agroforestry to climate change, soil conservation and (agro-)biodiversity and to greater economic, environmental and social sustainability of farming
– Improved configuration and management of agroforestry systems
– Enhanced capacities of various actors to measure the economic, environmental and social performance of agroforestry
– Robust European agroforestry innovation ecosystem

Intro

Proposals are expected to integrate and optimise AI, data and robotics solutions in order to demonstrate, by addressing use-cases scenarios in actual or highly realistic operating environments, how they can directly contribute to the Green Deal. The proposed methodology should be supported by industry or service relevant KPIs, making the case for the added value of such technologies, and demonstrating scalability, and deployment potential. Technology performance as well as added value to the application field should be demonstrated by qualitative and quantitative KPIs, demonstrators, benchmarking and progress monitoring. The environmental impacts of the proposed solutions should also be taken into account when making the case for the added value of the technology for the environment.

Scope

While the proposals must be application driven, involving problem owners to define needs and validate the proposed solutions, the focus is on optimising enabling AI, data and robotics technologies to maximise the benefit they bring in such applications. Proposals should adopt a concrete problem solving approach, exploiting and optimising the most suitable technologies and solutions at hand. The focus should be on real-world scenarios, which can benefit in short to mid-term from the technology and solutions and demonstrate substantial impact on the Green Deal, while taking into account the maturity of the technologies to solve the problems at hand.

Objective

– Innovative AI, data and robotics solutions for resource optimisation and minimisation of waste in any type of sector (from agri-food, to energy, utilities, transport, production, etc.), reduction of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions including exploitation of all data and information sources contributing to optimising applications for a greener planet.
– Optimised AI, data and robotics (including modular and adaptive solutions) to maximise contribution to the Green Deal in various applications such as environmental and waste management
– Advanced physical intelligence and physical performance of robotics solutions in diverse harsh environments serving the Green Deal.

The proliferation of advanced long-range Integrated Air Defence Systems (IADS), incorporating threats that can operate across different frequency bands and attack aircraft at ranges up to 400 km, could create Anti Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) areas. In such A2/AD areas, which could equally affect EU Member States’ and associated countries’ airspace, air operations including projection of forces by air would not be possible in case of emergence of a crisis.

-Development of complementary building blocks technologies and components addressing the electronic warfare challenges and the development and the production of a prototype as an airborne electronic attack capability demonstrator by the end of 2027
-Threat identification and tracking should be addressed, as the prerequisite for effective electronic counter measure (ECM)
-Consider potential synergies and complementarity with ongoing projects at national, multinational or EU level

-Enable any platform involved in AEA missions to adapt to the latest in electronic warfare (EW) requirements, which include (soft) suppression of enemy air defences, escort role, electronic attack, self-protected/time-critical strike support, and continuous capability enhancement
-Develop in the area of electronic attacks
-Develop a set of building blocks to be installed in different platforms and systems leading to the reduction of the operational risks related to EU Member States and Norway air force engagements within European territories as well as the force-projection in other potential areas of operations.

“The aim of this topic is to deliver digital twin solutions which advance the state-of-art of European RIs and show transformative potential in RI operations. The solutions should pave way for new ways to conduct experiments by the RIs through AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) empowered digital twins. Mixed reality (XR) technologies can also be considered.

-Development of Digital Twin solutions for RIs that take advantage of AR/VR technologies for interactive visualisation and bring together the available relevant data resources in the specific topical area
-Validation and Prototyping of technology to cope with a large and representative application area to test the relevance of the solutions with the needs of relevant industrial, scientific or policy end users
-Prepare for take-up of the developed solutions by clearly identified and involved industrial, scientific or policy end users, and include relevant training for the operation and use of these new solutions

-Improve availability of advanced modelling and prediction capabilities aimed at industrial, scientific or policy end users on fundamental, complex and socio-economically relevant real-life phenomena, including consideration of the posibility to replace the need for physical experiments and interventions by using digital twins
-Enhance competitiveness and improve effectiveness of European RIs
-Improve integration of RIs into local, regional, and global innovation and decision support systems”

Intro

The current trajectories of social and economic development are destroying the ecosystems that ultimately sustain humankind. Identifying and defining direct and indirect anthropogenic and environmental stressors and their interactions should be the first step towards correctly quantifying their effects and feeding the models (forecast).

Scope

– Develop a systemic approach for the integrated impact assessment of cumulative direct and indirect stressors on coastal and marine ecosystems processes and services
– Characterise, measure, and understand the combined impact of different types of pressures or perturbations on coastal and marine biodiversity and ecosystems condition
– Increased understanding of the biological mechanisms that determine the response of organisms and ecosystems to environmental changes
– Integrate existing and new biodiversity data and knowledge from multiple origins
– Develop technologies, methods and models that can quantify and forecast how cumulative anthropogenic perturbations that can affect ecosystem’s sustainability, productivity and resilience
– Contribution to enhancing the overall societal and public understanding of link between marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and human health

Objective

– Prediction of impacts of multiple stressors on coastal and marinebiodiversity, ecosystems functioning and all its services
– Better management and impact assessment of invasive species
– Implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive by determining pressure levels
– Ecosystem based management approaches and policy measures for activities both at sea and on land to reduce pressures to ensure Good Environmental Status

Proposals will contain a set of activities, but are not necessarily limited to, sustainable fishery management and practices, pollution reduction and sustainable shipping,prevention and control of invasive species, marine habitat preservation and protection, establishment of marine reserves impacts of climate change and nursery habitats. To safeguard biodiversity against climate change, adaptive management approaches are also expected to be considered as well as minimisation of cumulative impacts of other stressors.

-Quantify the impact of climate change (acidification, sea-level rise, deoxygenation, ocean warmings, primary production, phytoplankton and zooplankton, etc.) on ocean and coastal ecosystems and biodiversity will be important to understand the stressors
-Support evidence-based data and awareness rasing on biodiversity conservation in relation to local/regional development and capacity building and will establish good practices for biodiversity-friendly local/regional initiatives and inspire specific transnational cooperation with EU Macro-regional regions

-Enhance the implementation of the Biodiversity Strategy 2030
-Technological, logistical, social and economic innovations to counteract marine biodiversity loss
-Enhance basin-scale cooperation in the Atlantic and Arctic, including through transition arrangements that create socially and economically sustainable propositions for local stakeholders