The overarching objective of Connecting Nature is to position Europe as a global leader in the innovation and implementation of nature-based solutions. The project partners will form a community of cities fostering peer-to-peer, transdisciplinary capacity-building between front-runner, fast-follower and multiplier cities. Connecting Nature will co-develop the policy and practices necessary to scale up urban resilience, innovation and governance via nature-based solutions. An open innovation ecosystem approach bringing together city governments, SMEs, academia and civic society will be used to co-produce usable and actionable knowledge in all cities. Connecting Nature will provide the reference framework for a new generation of urban nature-based solution processes and empower transitioning ambassadors who will globalise this approach through a strategy targeting multiplier cities. This novel approach, coupled with the high capacity of the consortium, makes Connecting Nature an exciting prospect. In addition, linking all open-sourced data to the Oppla platform will ensure perpetuation beyond the end of the project.

SPROUT provides a new city-led innovative and data driven policy response to address the impacts of the emerging mobility patterns, digitally-enabled operating & business models, and transport users’ needs. Previously tested and implemented policy responses employing access restrictions, congestion charging or infrastructure provision, seem today, unable to adequately address the changes underway in the urban mobility scene. Furthermore, any policy responses should take into all stages of the policy lifecycle and should have an eye not only to the present but also to the future. Therefore, starting from an understanding of the transition taking place in urban mobility, SPROUT will define the resultant impacts at the sustainability and policy level, will harness these through a city-led innovative policy response, will build cities’ data-driven capacity to identify, track and deploy innovative urban mobility solutions, and will navigate future policy by channelling project results at local, regional, national and EU level. To achieve its goals, SPROUT will employ 6 city pilots (including China) with real-life policy challenges faced as a result of urban mobility transition in both passenger & freight, covering urban and peri-urban areas, different emerging mobility solutions, and context requirements. The project pays special attention to the needs of vulnerable groups and users with different cultural backgrounds, taking also into account gender issues. SPROUT ensures an active participation of numerous representatives from authorities of small & medium-sized cities through a 3-layer structure of cities’ engagement approach, and through the creation of an Open Innovation Community on Urban Mobility Policy.

MOBILITIES FOR EU aims at demonstrating that innovative passenger mobility and freight transport concepts designed and implemented following participative and user-center principles are cost-effective and feasible solutions to contribute significantly to the cities’ transformation towards climate-neutrality, allowing to speed up the process even to reach SCOPE 2 emissions reduction in 2030. Madrid (Spain) and Dresden (Germany) will implement 11 pilots comprising 27 very innovative solutions for mobility of people and freight, exploiting the combined potential of electrification, automation and connectivity, from the design to the implementation and evaluation stages acting as Lead Cities (LC). Both cities also ambition to act as pioneers of this process, taking advantage of multiple already existing initiates of social engagement and empowerment that will be integrated in the idea of Urban Transport Labs (UT-Labs), conceived as Innovation Hubs with the aim of fostering faster upscaling and replicability at EU level, making 5 Replication Cities (Ioaninna–Greece, Trencin–Slovakia, Espoo-Finland, Gdansk-Poland and Sarajevo-Bosnia&Herzegovina) through their own UT-Labs direct participants of the processes and later on main protagonists of their own designs.

CLIMABOROUGH is an Innovation project designed to field test the ClimHub, Climate Sandbox and Climate Service concepts within 12 European Cities engaged in their ecological and digital transition. The project aims to enhance traditional urban and spatial planning approaches through data and knowledge based decision making (including a possible new role for GIS - Geographic Information Systems), including climate services co-production for transitions, cross-city and cross-country pilot co-creation as well as the tactical use of public procurement of innovative solutions. The goal is not just to enhance an open set of tools leveraging climate transition in cities, but also to boost the exchange of experimental good practices, experiences and lessons learnt in this field, to help cities meet climate neutrality by 2050. This will be achieved by the following expected results: (A) building ClimHubs of Cities and solution providers to work on experimentations in real conditions, (B) harnessing the collective intelligence of local stakeholders for collaborative solution development, (C) defining Climate Services as a model strategy to use data and visualisation tools for climate transition, (D) field testing the Climate Sandbox concept as a way to prioritise and facilitate transformation of successfully deployed prototypes into established solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation in cities, and (E) monitoring and assessing the progress in achieving those goals and in implementing a climate neutrality planning scheme. Based on the lessons learnt and successful concept of the H2020 Designscapes CSA, CLIMABOROUGH has the ambition to bridge the gap between design and implementation of urban innovations, particularly in the domain of climate change adaptation and mitigation.

POCITYF supports the Lighthouse cities of Evora (PT) and Alkmaar (NL) and their Fellow cities Granada (ES), Bari (ΙΤ), Celje (SI), Ujpest (HU), Ioannina (GR) and Hvidovre (DK) to address their urgent need to deliver positive energy blocks and districts in their cities, towards rendering their mixed urban environment (also including the case of cultural protected buildings) into cheaper, better accessible, healthier and more reliable. By demonstrating in overall 10 integrated solutions (ISs), comprising 73 individual innovative elements (technologies, tools, methods), rooted under existing City Information Platforms (CIPs), POCITYF quantifies their value, and connects interests of many different stakeholders in innovative business models, allowing for upscale and replication of those solutions in a form of a validated roadmap for sustainable cities across Europe and world-wide. To achieve this, POCITYF works along 4 Energy Transition Tracks (ETTs), encompassing the ISs according to the role each one serves for. ETT#1 focuses on the examination and application of ISs transforming existing and new building stock into Energy Positive, while ETT#2 focuses on the application of a) grid flexibility strategies and b) storage systems, supported by DSM platforms for optimizing energy flows to maximize self-consumption and reduce grid stress. ETT#3 with its merit of innovation offers the integration of e-Mobility to as well promote the decarbonisation of the mobility sector. The 3 ETTs under the coordination of ETT#4, which links existing CIPs with innovative apps and other instruments, offers inclusive and holistic services for interdisciplinary citizen engagement and co-creation of them with the city stakeholders and industry, towards the development of each city’s own bold city-vision up to 2050. Through POCITYF the two LHs will achieve a local RES penetration of 16.2 GWh/y, energy savings of 2.32 GWh/y and an emission reduction of 9,743 tons CO2eq/y within their districts.