“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”

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

“All the EU industrial ecosystems should adapt to the post-crisis economic environment, with new consumer and industrial demand, changed competition and new resilience and sustainability objectives. This adaptation will be particularly challenging for SMEs. The economic recovery in Europe, after the COVID-19 pandemic, will only materialise if SMEs are properly supported by adequate actions and policy measures to adapt to changed value-chains and demand. It is essential for companies to map their supply chain in order to identify critical dependencies and weaknesses in specific industrial ecosystem. There is a need for developing methodology or model that can assist companies in detecting and anticipating disruptions in their supply chains. Such a model would contribute to reduce strategic dependencies on critical products, services or technologies.

-Achieving operational independence through adoption of advanced technologies
-Drive towards less uncertainty and complexity through new technology implementation
-Fostering efficiency through AR/VR solutions enabling experts to provide remote support to on-field operations
-Push for product innovation through the adoption of advanced materials

-Build a model for each industrial ecosystem identifying disruptions and technical opportunities for uptake of advanced technologies in a supply chain
-Identify potential alternate suppliers of critical advanced technologies
-Explore concrete collaboration opportunities between different types of EU businesses, particularly tech-savvy SMEs and traditional SMEs
-Increase adoption of advanced technologies in traditional SMEs
-Demonstrate advanced technology adoption in SMEs as enablers to reduce resource, material, and energy consumption”

“External land borders of the European Union and of the Schengen area present different border surveillance challenges, ranging from those closer to the Mediterranean, to Nordic Countries’ external land borders, which may lead to difficulties in efficiently monitoring them, deterring illegal activities across the external borders, as well as tracking trafficking of human beings and exploitation of irregular migration that avoid border crossing points. Furthermore, the border surveillance capabilities needs along land borders may change in time, often just within a year or a season, and/or need to respond and adapt with relatively short notice. Solutions must hence allow to re-orient capacity and resources accordingly (through physical portability and/or other approaches).

-Improve cooperation for surveillance along land borders through compatibility and interoperability among legacy and planned systems among EU and associated countries
-Explotiation of other information sharing environments, including the Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) along with integration with the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR)
-Development of sustainable, cost and energy efficient equipment and technologies enabling land border surveillance

-Increased land border surveillance capabilities, better performing and more cost-efficient, with data and fundamental rights protection by design
-Better surveillance of land border areas, supporting fight against illegal activities across external borders, as well as safety of people and operators in the border areas, including favouring border crossings through border crossing points
-More efficient and more flexible solutions, including relocation, reconfiguration and rapid deployment capabilities, comparable to physical barriers to deter and monitor irregular border crossings outside border crossing points”

While not being a new concept, living labs are currently receiving considerable attention as they accelerate the translation of research into practical application. For the purpose of this mission, “Soil health living labs” are defined as “user-centred, place-based and transdisciplinary research and innovation ecosystems, which involve land managers, scientists and other relevant partners in systemic research and co-design, testing, monitoring and evaluation of solutions, in real-life settings, to improve their effectiveness for soil health and accelerate adoption.”. Each living lab is a collaboration between multiple partners working together at regional or sub-regional level, typically comprising 10 – 20 sites. These sites can represent all types of land uses and be for example farms, forest stands, protected areas, green sites or industrial sites in urban and rural areas.

-Establishment of a cluster of (at least) five living labs as the basis for embarking into participatory research and innovation on a common soil health related challenge
-Carry out participatory and transdisciplinary research and innovation in living labs, bringing together relevant stakeholders such as scientists, farmers, advisors, consumers, agencies, NGOs, industries, public authorities and citizens to work on a common, context-specific problem
-Co-create, test, and implement solutions for the identified soil health challenge(s) by proposing experimentations in real-life settings which shall be designed and executed in conjunction with research organizations and universities
-Develop monitoring methods to be applied at the level of the various sites and help assess and compare progress and result of work across the various sites and living labs under a project
-Develop training material and carry out training sessions

-Improved soil health in different regions within the EU and AC where the selected living labs projects are operating with a measurable contribution to the specific objectives of the Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ and its overall goal of setting up a network of 100 living labs ad lighthouses by 2030
-Increased and accelerated uptake of good practices and methodologies by land managers or other actors in and beyond living lab areas, tackling specific soil health challenges
-Policy-makers are more aware of local needs with regard to soil health and can use this knowledge in the design and implementation of more effective policy instruments

Urban mobility is a key sector that cities need to address for accelerating their transition to climate neutrality: citizens, freight forwarders, urban planners, transport operators as well as technology providers should jointly exploit the combined potentials of electric , automated and connected vehicles as well as integrated and shared people mobility and freight transport in their planning and actions. This requires a mutual understanding and alignment of the opportunities of technical solutions from the CCAM and 2Zero partnerships and of needs identified by users and cities striving for the Mission target of climate neutrality.

-Co-design process between local public authorities, city planners, end users and automated and zero-emission mobility systems providers to ensure a user-centric and seamless integration of solutions in existing ecosystems
-Demonstrate integrated and shared, automated and zero-emission solutions and services for people mobility and freight transport
-Develop open while resilient systems and replicable solutions that can be scaled-up within a city environment and flexibly adapted to current and evolving needs and use cases in the context of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP)
-Evaluate cost and benefits of the systems and services tested along with real-world challenges and opportunities, based on user and city needs

-Mobility solutions that respond to people’s and cities’ needs, co-designed with local authorities, citizens and stakeholders, tested and implemented in cities to achieve climate neutrality by 2030
-Transferrable solutions for mobility of people and goods exploiting the combined potential of electrification, automation and connectivity to significantly and measurably contribute to: lower energy demand, improved air quality, less noise, reduced congestion, more reliable predictive travel times and more efficient transport operations, improved safety particularly for vulnerable road users, improved inclusiveness
-Implementation plans for local and regional transport authorities to replicate the roll-out of innovative smart mobility solutions and related infrastructure (in particular for charging and/or connectivity) in cities beyond those involved in the project

“The Cloud-Edge Continuum must provide seamless management schemes to allow services and data to be processed across various providers, connectivity types and network zones. This requires innovative management techniques and computational methods of the whole computing continuum from Cloud to Edge to IoT that are enabled by Swarm computing and decentralised intelligence

-Novel automated management tools, programming models, learning, and decision-making methods and approaches able to cope with end-to-end security and identity management, resources heterogeneity, extreme scale and fault-tolerance together with elasticity to flexibly allocate resources and tasks
-Incorporation of tools and mechanisms that enable optimisation of energy efficiency and ecological sustainability taking into account end-to-end data processing across the continuum

-Enhanced openness and open strategic autonomy in the evolving data and AI-economies across the computing continuum including adapted system integration at the edge and at device level
-Establishment of adaptive hybrid computing, cognitive clouds and edge intelligence beyond today’s investments on data infrastructure
-Better international collaboration with trusted partner regions, guaranteeing a minimum level of interoperability, portability thereby fostering competition in the Cloud/Edge services market for the European market and facilitate European access to foreign markets “

Copernicus data and services products will be at the core of the projects’ data value chains and integration activities needed to fulfil the industrial and users requirements that will drive the actions

Scope:

-Bring to market new or improved applications, products and services by exploiting Copernicus data assets and services products

Topics:

-Contribute to increasing the integration and uptake of Copernicus into the
economy, and/or to solve societal challenges

-The integration of Copernicus data assets with data contributed by other verticals domains into sizeable and scalable applications enabled by modern ICT technologies to enhance Copernicus downstream market and enable vertical domains (e.g. agriculture, food security, health, energy, natural resources, environmental monitoring, insurance, tourism, security etc…) to benefit from the use of Copernicus

Enhanced quality and enhanced efficiency of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring and Copernicus Climate Change services to respond to evolving policy and/or user requirements and to technological developments

The areas of R&I are:
– Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service evolution
– Copernicus Climate Change Service evolution
– Research activities to develop new and innovative methods to improve the numerical requirements (accuracy, mass-conservation) for the numerical schemes in the CO2MVS system

– Continuation of the set-up of the new Copernicus service element for the monitoring of anthropogenic CO2 emissions

– Development of efficient and reliable new product chains

– Development of new algorithms and processing chains preparing for the use of new types of space observation data

– Development of innovative and robust methodologies for characterising the likelihood of occurrence extremely hazardous events as well as of compound and/or sequences of and/or cascading hazardous events in the present and in future climate

– Development of an appropriate framework for attributing extreme compound, sequences and/or cascading events to climate variability and change

The coastal zones have tremendous social, economic and biological value but are exposed to a high level of pressure due to climate change and human activities. It is essential to advance Copernicus solutions to answer policy (e.g. WFD, MSFD, MSP, CFP, Flood Directive, Arctic Policy, Green Deal) needs to better manage and protect the coastal zone, to ensure the development of a sustainable blue economy (e.g. tourism, energy extraction, fisheries, offshore operations, industrial port areas, cities growth), and to build resilience to climate change, human activities being potentially exposed and vulnerable to many hazards of natural or anthropic origins, including storm surges, flooding, acidification, ice melting, and degradation of ecosystems.

-Development of improved pan-European satellite coastal observation retrievals (e.g. sea level, sea surface temperature, ocean colour, bathymetry, shoreline position, winds, waves, ice changes.), notably derived from Sentinel data, and an improved access and processing of in-situ data in the coastal zone
-Development of improved inputs of freshwater flows and associated river inputs of particulate and dissolved organic and mineral matter
-Development of improved coupling techniques between Copernicus Marine observations and modelling systems and downstream coastal observation and modelling systems operated by Member States and Copernicus Participating States including an impact assessment for key coastal applications and EU policies (e.g. MSFD, WFP, MSP, CFP, Green Deal).

-Enhanced quality and efficiency of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service to respond to policy and user requirements, technological developments implementing the space regulations, and challenges targeted by the Horizon Europe Mission on ‘Healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters’
-Development of efficient and reliable new products chains
-Development of new algorithms and processing chains preparing the use of the new types of space observation data in order to allow development of new products or the improvement of existing products