Today, 19th and 20th c. modern period buildings are the trademark of numerous European cities, forming a great part of EU Built Heritage, reflecting and shaping the identity of our local, national and multinational societies. Considering that historic buildings are ineffective in terms of energy consumption for heating and cooling, among the biggest restoration and renovation challenges is to enhance the energy performance of historic buildings. SINCERE aims to elucidate the values of Built Heritage and provide the tools for optimizing the carbon footprint and energy performance of historic buildings, towards the requirements of net-zero-carbon-buildings, by utilizing innovative, sustainable, and cost-effective restoration materials and practices, energy harvesting technologies, ICT tools and socially innovative approaches. SINCERE adapts a multi-scale concept, from material-, to building-, to neighbourhood- to city-scale, applied on the three main parts of buildings: structure, external envelope (opaque), and transparent parts, implemented at different time-frames, in order to provide decision making tools to the stakeholders involved in the process, considering the full-service life of the buildings, including restoration, operation, monitoring and maintenance phases. Energy performance in terms of retrofitting materials and solutions will be optimized according to the buildings’ unique structural, architectural, functional and materials characteristics, their environmental setup, as well as local future climate change scenarios. SINCERE will provide a palette portfolio of sustainable restoration options that will be evaluated by H-BIM/H-DT tools in order to enable the selection of optimum solutions and the planning of necessary adaptation actions. SINCERE will also focus on raising awareness and empowering Europeans to promote the concept of preservation CH buildings by disseminating the obtained results through national and international scale activities.

DigiArt seeks to provide a new, cost efficient solution to the capture, processing and display of cultural artefacts. It offers innovative 3D capture systems and methodologies, including aerial capture via drones, automatic registration and modelling techniques to speed up post-capture processing (which is a major bottleneck), semantic image analysis to extract features from digital 3D representations, a “story telling engine” offering a pathway to a deeper understanding of art, and also augmented/virtual reality technologies offering advanced abilities for viewing, or interacting with the 3D models. The 3D data captured by the scanners and drones, using techniques such as laser detection and ranging (LIDAR), are processed through robust features that cope with imperfect data. Semantic analysis by automatic feature extraction is used to form hyper-links between artefacts. These links are employed to connect the artefacts in what the project terms “the internet of historical things”, available anywhere, at any time, on any web-enabled device. The contextual view of art is very much enhanced by the “story telling engine” that is developed within the project. The system presents the artefact, linked to its context, in an immersive display with virtual and/or with augmented reality. Linkages and information are superimposed over the view of the item itself. The major output of the project is the toolset that will be used by museums to create such a revolutionary way of viewing and experiencing artefacts. These tools leverage the interdisciplinary skill sets of the partners to cover the complete process, namely data capture, data processing, story building, 3D visualization and 3D interaction, offering new pathways to deeper understanding of European culture. Via its three demonstration activities, the project establishes the viability of the approach in three different museum settings, offering a range of artefacts posing different challenges to the system.

TOWCHED will demonstrate transformative potential of inclusive, arts-based and heritage collections-mediated educational interventions for children and youth, using SDGs as the results framework. These interventions, piloted in collaboration between Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs), Collections-based Organizations (CBOs) and educational institutions across Europe, will be critically assessed,providing a field-tested and well-supported roadmap to enriching our learning ecology with creative use of heritage, thus making Europe, and our world, a better place for all. Our innovative approach relies on the application of the Human Rights-based Approach (HRBA) as a project planning tool, which is foundational in Agenda2030 and the SDGs. TOWCHED will actively engage with children, young people, educators, creatives, heritage professionals, policymakers and professional development providers to ensure our goals and impacts are not only achieved, but that stakeholders can shape these goals in line with the principles of Leave No-one Behind, and the Right to Development. Furthermore, we will focus on lifelong perspectives, from early childhood education and care to young adult education in formal and non-formal learning environments. We will seek to empower CBOs to be more effective in supporting sustainable development through educational activities that foster people’s active, free, and meaningful participation. Our transdisciplinary approach will lead to creation of community of practice for competence-based sustainable development education and life-long learning rooted in our rich European heritage. The project will provide practical tools, and develop capacities to use these tools. In pursuit of these objectives, we will work closely with the transdisciplinary New European Bauhaus (NEB) and other similar initiatives. By integrating our project into this broader European movement, we aspire to contribute to the transformation of societies for a sustainable future.

The project SECOVE aims to establish a network of cooperation among Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs) in the sector of clean and sustainable energy. The CoVEs will be established in 5 European countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, and Portugal) and will all cooperate transnationally with each other through common structured forms of dialogue and communication.The activities of SECOVE are structured as follows. At the core of the project lies the establishment of the five CoVEs and of the SECOVE platform. A structured dialogue will be carried out locally and transnationally, in order to ensure a common, European approach across countries.The other activities can be intended as sectorial components of the SECOVE platform. Specifically, these are: the production of educational material that will make VET more relevant for the needs of the current sustainable energy job market, the nurturing of synergies between industry representatives and VET institutions, the promotion of an inclusive and attractive approach of VET towards women and the mainstreaming of a culture of quality and innovation in vocational education and training.A wide range of groups will benefit from the implementation of these activities: VET students and institutions, companies (both staff and managers) in the area of sustainable energy, women across educational levels and sectors, policymakers at local, national and European level and so forth.The activities foresee the organization of several impactful events: 28 local and transnational workshops as well as networking events with stakeholders (for a total of 590 participants), mobilities (benefitting 45 VET students), 9 Summer VET academies for girls in secondary education (180 participants expected), 4 capacity building events (training of 89 persons from partner organizations) and finally 3 Transnational Conferences (for a total of 210 participants).

The TRIQUETRA project aims at creating an evidence-based assessment platform that allows precise risk stratification, and also creates a database of available mitigation measures and strategies, acting as a Decision Support Tool towards efficient risk mitigation and site remediation. The overall approach of Triquetra is based on three distinct steps: 1. Risk Identification 2. Risk Quantification 3. Risk Mitigation This “trifecta” approach (hence the name Triquetra) creates a framework of risk assessment and risk mitigation so as to tackle as many of these risks as possible, in the most efficient way available. This is further analysed in the following sections.