Different climate risks are considered in climate adaptation strategies at the local, regional, and national level, as well as in the EU Adaptation to Climate Change Mission. The interdependencies between risks are also increasingly considered. However, achievement of full climate resilience requires going much further: considering interdependencies across sectors, spatial scales, governance levels, and knowledge domains. The systemic challenges behind the risks are to be addressed, creating synergies that increase public support and make adaptation more affordable. Recognizing these systemic challenges also requires standardization to optimize upscaling and replication. SMARTER aims to support a transformative change needed for systemic climate adaptation by addressing these cross-sectoral interdependencies. To achieve this, we set up 10 Climate Adaptation Labs, spread over Europe, in which we develop and demonstrate a systemic approach, including supporting tools at the local and regional scale. The Labs host 5 demonstration pilots and 7 replication pilots, which have already identified different cross-sectoral domains that relate to their contextual climate adaptation challenges. Each of them contributes to a portfolio of solutions and guidelines for systemic climate adaptation. Solutions are built through participatory co-design and demonstration, combined with systemic foresight. Key outcomes include an integrated toolbox for systemic climate adaption, a harmonized portfolio of demonstrated solutions and evaluation framework, replication strategies, and road maps for climate adaptation with consideration for the financial and administrative aspects. SMARTER will directly impact regions and communities through the transformative solutions demonstrated, while they are empowered to realize the transformative change with the tools and approaches provided. This will increase their foresight capacity and accelerates the achievement of climate resilience.

Το άρθρο HORIZON EU | SMARTER: Systemic Transformation Towards Local and Regional Climate Resilience εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

The frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes associated with anthropogenic climate change are increasing and will challenge us in terms of adaptation strategies at the local level. The project “Climate Resilient Development Pathways in Metropolitan Regions of Europe (CARMINE)” bridges the local and regional scales by providing impact-based decision support services and multilevel climate governance supporting local adaptation, including both traditional and Nature-Based Solutions. CARMINE’s overarching goal is to help the metropolitan communities of Europe become more climate resilient, by co-producing knowledge-based tools, strategies, and plans for enhanced adaptation and mitigation actions in line with the Charter of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change by 2030. To achieve this goal, focusing on the 2030-2035 timeframe and with longer perspectives up to 2050, CARMINE proposes an interdisciplinary approach aiming at (1) co-creation and co-development of decision-support services and guidelines for enhanced resilience and adaptive capacity, including early warning and disaster risk management systems; (2) cooperating closely with local to regional communities (stakeholders and users), decision-, and policy-makers (local authorities) to co-develop cross-sectoralframeworks for adaptation and mitigation actions; (3) delivering science-based R&I roadmaps for multi-level climate governance supporting local adaptation assessments and plans. The CARMINE methodology will be implemented in eight selected Case Study Areas to demonstrate proof of concept and project methodology will be demonstrated through the digital replication of climate and socioeconomic characteristics of each area. The co-created knowledge and transferable development pathways from CARMINE will be shared widely via project networks in order to drive adaptation in other metropolitan regions of Europe, and beyond.

Project website

Partnership:
Athena – Research & Innovation Information Technologies, ATHENA RC – GREECE

Principal Investigator
Prof. Phoebe Koundouri

Team Members
Dr. Ebun Akinsete    Dr. Konstantinos Dellis    Dr. Lida Dimitriadou    Prof. Elias Giannakis    Alice Guittard    Panagiota Koltsida   Voula Samara   Giannis Marnelis    Monika Mavragani   Anna Triantafyllidou    Eleni Toli

Το άρθρο HORIZON EU | CARMINE: Climate-Resilient Development Pathways in Metropolitan Regions of Europe εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

1. the assessment of the current situation regarding the twin transition in Greece
2. the recording of opinions, attitudes, value orientations, and behavioral predispositions of both the general public and individual social groups,
3. providing technological solutions and tools to support policy proposals (data-driven policy making)
4. the content and focus of public policies in relation to twin transition

The above is examined regarding the positive and negative impacts the green and digital transition has on:

• individuals and households
• business and the economy in general
• the planning and implementation processes of sectoral policies

So that digital transformation and decarbonization are achieved in terms of equity, resilience, sustainable development and social inclusion.

The project aims to:

1. Collect and analyze primary data
2. Process secondary data
3. Utilise common research infrastructures
4. Map areas that are cumulatively or differentially affected or benefited by the green transition and digital transformation
5. Identify professional groups and economic sectors that cumulatively or differentially suffer or benefit from the dual transition
6. Identify education and training needs in digital and green skills
7. Create an observatory of the key indicators of the Green and Digital Transition and convergence with UN goals for sustainable development
8. Develop a digital portal with cartographic and other data to assist targeted public policy measures
9. Elaborate public policy proposals for the green and digital transition

ATHENA Research Center/ Sustainable Development Unit participate in the project coordinated by EKKE, under the thematic Pillar of Social impact of green and digital transformation. 

Principal Investigator
Prof. Phoebe Koundouri

Team members:
Stathis Devves     Prof. Elias Giannakis     Fanis Zacharatos

The funding for the project is provided through the Recovery and Resilience Fund under Greece’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Greece 2.0)

Το άρθρο JustReDI: Resilience, inclusiveness and development: Towards a just green and digital transition of Greek regions εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

The Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are an invaluable instrument for modeling climate stabilization pathways and for supporting the policy makers in taking better-informed decisions. Nevertheless, the mitigation options traditionally focused on in IAMs are the supply-side measures, whereas less attention used to be paid to demand-side and food system representation, due to the inherent complexity and actor heterogeneity. CHOICE aspires to mainstream IAMs, embedding them into the lifestyle choices and decision-making process of consumers, producers and actors of the Food, Agriculture and Land Use sectors. This ambition is leveraged by a more realistic representation of behaviour change and actor heterogeneity aspects in IAMs, and supported by an approach that bridges social science and marketing tools, with the aim of accelerating climate action. This approach will be supported by the large-scale adoption of CHOICE digital immersive tools, data storytelling and gamification, whose design is underpinned by notions of emotional appeals and social incentives. Using these digital enablers, CHOICE will orchestrate large-scale engagement and ‘green marketing’ campaigns, that have a wide geographical and societal dispersity. Thus, starting from a bottom-up analysis of individual consumers and actors of the food supply chain, and understanding their behavior and their potential for change, CHOICE will use this information in order to consistently feed into a new generation of IAM models, that will correctly reflect the underlying heterogeneity, accounting for multiple representative consumers and actors. The IAM-generated impacts from highly influential 1.5oC-compatible mitigation actions shall highlight, besides emissions, the co-benefits of their changes in behaviour or practice in terms of health, biodiversity and food security aspects, in familiar scales.

Project website

Work package 2: Modelling and promoting behavior change around food towards IPCC goals: Lead beneficiary ATHENA RC

Objectives:

• Provide the framework for mapping the socio-economic profiles of actors along the food consumption and food supply chain related to the CHOICE pilot demonstrations, to ensure wide geographic and societal dispersity;
• Model the Supply and Demand chain’s behavioral change options;
• Determine the pair of interventions and conversion goals matching each mitigation measure and local specificities for CHOICE pilots; liaise with WP6 (Task 6.1) in order to match requirements regarding pilot goals and participation levels at each campaign iteration (modify campaign duration and population to achieve suitable results);
• Design and implement randomized control experiments to evaluate and optimize messages, designs, and interventions;

Το άρθρο HORIZON EU | CHOICE: Mainstream Mitigation Pathways for a Climate-Conscious Change in the Food System εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

As climatic conditions are constantly changing and the frequency of extreme events increases, there is an urgency to plan,  designing, and retrofit the built environment in order to adapt it to present and future risks. Too frequently the built environment is a driver of vulnerability, rather than being a shelter for citizens. For this reason, mitigation and adaptation need to be pursued actively, putting the built environment and human resilience at the center of a climate and future-proofing action. The MULTICLIMACT project aims to develop a mainstream framework and a tool for supporting public stakeholders and citizens to assess the resilience of the built environment and its people at multiple scales (buildings, urban areas, territories) against locally relevant natural and climatic hazards and supply chains, as well as to support them to enhance their preparedness and responsiveness across their life cycle. The mainstreamed approach will include a method specifically targeted for including several types of built environment assets, including human well-being, health, and quality of life as an essential scale of analysis and action. MULTICLIMACT will support resilience-enabling ACTions by implementing a toolkit of 18 reliable, easy-to-implement, and cost-effective Design Methods, Materials, and Digital Solutions, enabling users to easily estimate the impact of their implementation on the resilience of the targeted asset, integrating a multidisciplinary approach integrating socio-economic, life, engineering, and climate disciplines. The MULTICLIMACT approach is integrated with relevant international and European initiatives, building upon existing knowledge and instruments, and demonstrating the proposed approach in four case studies that represent various geographical locations, natural and climatic hazards, social and economic systems, and scales of analysis, ranging from single buildings (including cultural heritage) to the urban and territorial scales.

Project website

23 Partners – Partnership: BRIGAID CONNECT Association

In the MULTICLIMACT project, our team participates through the Brigaid Connect association.

Team Members:
Prof. Phoebe Koundouri   Dr. Konstantinos Dellis 

BRC will lead the integration of the MULTICLIMACT toolkit into the Climate Innovation Window, toward its international outreach (T16.4). Furthermore, we will contribute to the several tasks across the WPs that include planning and designing resilient housing and a human-centered built environment for improving people’s health and well-being, design digital solutions for monitoring of environmental and structural behaviour of buildings, assessing current resilience of built environment assets, and development of the digital solution for the application to a real demo case.

MULTICLIMACT is a Horizon Europe project supported by the European Commission under grant agreement No 101123538

Το άρθρο Horizon EU | MULTICLIMACT MULTI-faceted CLIMate adaptation ACTions to improve resilience, preparedness and responsiveness of the built environment against multiple hazards at multiple scales εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

We do this by: (a) mobilising regional interest and progressively elevating the ambition and capability of regions; (b) developing a Regional Resilience Journey framework (and supporting services) to equip regions and communities in developing climate resilience pathways and connected innovation agendas; (c) allocating €21M across 100 regions and communities via three open call cycles to support their Journeys (d) triggering a wide engagement of citizens and diverse stakeholders in the co-creation of the pathways; (e) increasing knowledge on adaptation innovations across Key Community Systems (KCS) and enabling conditions; (f) boosting literacy and access to (innovative) adaptation finance; and (g) developing a Resilience Maturity Curve to baseline and monitor regional resilience capacities.

Led by Climate KIC, the Pathways2Resilience  consortium brings the combined strength of: regional network organisations, technical designers and innovators of transformative adaptation, adaptation finance experts, learning and capability building specialists, and monitoring and innovation impact partner.

EU project: Pathways2Resilience has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101093942.

Το άρθρο Horizon EU | Pathways2Resilience: Co-developing Pathways Towards Climate Resilient Regions in Europe εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

MAIA will act as an impact multiplier by providing social structures, and technological and outreach activities to accompany, potentiate and help maximize the impact of climate research projects funded under Horizon Europe. MAIA constitutes the response from a group of coordinators and core partners from seven H2020 precursor projects in climate change research (BINGO, BRIGAID, CLARITY,  Connecting Nature, DRIVER+, PLACARD and RESCUE). In these projects, driven by the EC’s advice to identify synergies and spark collaboration, we liaised and detected a clear need for increased connectivity and a more robust approach to synergies management as a means to unlock more meaningful and impact-oriented interactions. MAIA pivots around connectivity as a key enabling factor for effective outreach. Therefore, we are envisioning specific actions for enhancing i) the connectivity of existing communities  (consolidation and activation of a Pan-European community of problem owners, solution providers, and enablers); ii) the connectivity  of knowledge and technological infrastructure (creation of the MAIA Portal); and iii) the connectivity of the EU climate research  (coordinating an EU climate change research Cluster).

Partnership: Athena – Research & Innovation Information Technologies, ATHENA RC – GREECE

Principal Investigator

Prof. Phoebe Koundouri

Team Members

Dr. Mariatzela Chatzigiannakou, Dr. Kostas Dellis, Dr. Georgina Spyres, Dr. Artemis Stratopoulou

Το άρθρο Horizon EU | ΜΑΙΑ: Maximising impact and accessibility of European climate research εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

ARSINOE is financed by the European Commission with a total budget of 15 million euros and is coordinated by the University of Thessaly. It brings together 41 partners from 15 countries and intends to be a game-changer for shaping pathways to resilience by delivering regional innovation packages that build an ecosystem to develop and implement innovative climate change adaptation measures and solutions across Europe.

Research laboratory on Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability (ReSEES) at Athens University of Economics and Business, directed by Prof. Koundouri is a partner of the project and Principal Investigator of the project is Prof. Phoebe Koundouri.

 Sustainable Development Unit (SDU), at “Athena” Research Center is also partner of the project  and the Principal Investigator is Dr. Ebun Akinsete.  SDU is Scientifically directed by Prof. Phoebe Koundouri.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon H2020 innovation action programme under grant agreement 101037424.

Το άρθρο Horizon 2020 | ARSINOE: Climate Resilient Regions Through Systemic Solutions and Innovations εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

As climate change progresses irrevocably, urgent measures are needed for building resilience and adaptive capacity. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, effective climate resilient regions cannot be built at expense of productive sectors, or without fair societal consensus. IMPETUS will develop and validate a coherent multi-scale, multi-level, cross-sectoral climate change adaptation framework to accelerate the transition towards a climate-neutral and sustainable economy.

IMPETUS Resilience Knowledge Boosters (RKBs) will build a robust Quintuple Helix stakeholders community (human dimension) complemented with reliable data and assessment methods to support decision and policy making (digital dimension). This will result in a community empowerment to co-design, assess, deploy, and monitor climate adaptation Innovation Packages, including R&I methodological, technological, governance, awareness, behavioural, economic, financial and pathway components. IMPETUS RKBs will be deployed and validated in all 7 EU biogeographical regions (Continental, Coastal, Mediterranean, Atlantic, Arctic, Boreal, Mountainous) covering all Key Community Systems, climate threats, and multi-level governance.

IMPETUS consortium is made of selected local, regional and national public authorities; R&D organisations; SMEs and large enterprises; and, international organisations, to build upon, upscale and demonstrate a wide range of R&D solutions. IMPETUS has a clear earmark to ensure continuity after the project lifetime through consolidated and interconnected RKBs and communities at different scales.

Official website

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101037084

Το άρθρο Horizon 2020 | IMPETUS: Dynamic Information Management Approach For The Implementation Of Climate Resilient Adaptation Packages In European Regions εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.

EUAcceL is an initiative of several higher education institutions (HEIs), their incubators, a research and development centre, start-ups, and established industry partners. It aims to accelerate innovation in Europe through open innovation, co-creation, and start-up development. EUAcceL’s vision is to create an international innovation ecosystem in Europe with all knowledge triangle actors involved. The goal is to foster innovation and start-up development with speed and quality, implement synergies with other innovation network initiatives, and create a leading European programme for entrepreneurship and innovation.

EUAcceL has three core pillars: an open entrepreneurship and co-creation framework, a scalability and sustainability plan, and an impact assessment framework.

EUAcceL sets a new paradigm that leverages entrepreneurial talents and start-ups, existing formats, and an infrastructure of a growing number of entrepreneurial HEIs and EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). EUAcceL’s objectives are as follows:

• integrate and assess impact in entrepreneurship education, start-up development, and co-creation;
• internationalise and collaborate within entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial structures, including regional innovation ecosystems, to scout talents, start-up teams, and start-up ideas;
• implement an open entrepreneurship and co-creation framework to help HEIs and ecosystem actors to iterate innovation activities, and foster innovation and start-up development with speed and quality;
• digitalise the open entrepreneurship and co-creation framework through virtual formats of entrepreneurship education and digital platforms for matching and co-creation;
• develop new business models to ensure funding opportunities for international start-ups, and continuation and growth of the initiative;
• scale the EUAcceL initiative with new HEIs, innovation ecosystem actors, and content to address additional EIT KICs;
• implement the scalability and sustainability plan of EUAcceL, and transform to a new Open Entrepreneurship Alliance entity.

Implementing EUAcceL’s core initiative pillars and objectives will support entrepreneurial HEIs in internationalising and strengthening their entrepreneurship education and start-up development formats. Furthermore, EUAcceL will co-create a digital ecosystem to bring continuous innovation opportunities to key targets and ecosystem stakeholders.

By 2023, EUAcceL will reach 15 universities in Europe, educate 900 students, support and train 120 professors and incubator consultants, develop 60 new start-ups, onboard 20 companies, and bring over 2,500 innovation ecosystem actors to the initiative.

By 2030, EUAcceL will become the leading holistic programme that unites entrepreneurial universities, research and development centres, industry partners, and a new generation of start-ups, and will change the innovation landscape in Europe and beyond.

• Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences – project lead
• FH Campus Wien
• Edinburgh Napier University
• GründES! Esslingen University
• The Edge
• Ghent University
• Research Centre of Athens University of Economics and Business
• University of Pisa

Partnership: Athens University of Economics and Business – Research Center, AUEB-RC – GREECE

Team: Prof. Katerina Pramatari, Prof. Phoebe Koundouri, Prof. Chrysi Laspidou.

Further information can be found here

ABOUT THE EIT

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) strengthens Europe’s ability to innovate by powering solutions to pressing global challenges and by nurturing entrepreneurial talent to create sustainable growth and skilled jobs in Europe. The EIT is an EU body and an integral part of Horizon Europe, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The Institute supports dynamic pan-European partnerships, EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities, among leading companies, research labs and universities.

ABOUT THE EIT’S HEI INITIATIVE

The EIT’s HEI Initiative is a key objective for the EIT as part of its new strategy, the EIT Strategic Innovation Agenda 2021 – 2027. The initiative aims to support higher education institutions with expertise and coaching, access to the EIT innovation ecosystem, and funding, enabling them to develop innovation action plans complementing the needs of individual higher education institutions. As part of its Pilot Phase, the initiative has provided funding to 23 projects, with the next call for proposals expected towards the end of 2021.

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Το άρθρο EIT | HEI initiative: Innovation capacity Building for Higher Education | EUAcceL: Accelerating Innovation in Europe Through Startup Development and Co-creation εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο Ae4ria.