The Sustainable Energy Financing Platform in Austria (SEFIPA) is designed as an action oriented platform to collect, develop, implement and disseminate innovative ideas to accelerate finance for sustainable energy. In contrast to the prevailing approach in Austria of subsidy based support of sustainable energy activities, SEFIPA will focus on increasing private sources of funds. The overall concept of SEFIPA is to bring together a selected group of experts from the relevant stakeholder institutions (public administration, financial sector, business and consumer associations, energy service providers, NGOs) to jointly develop solutions to identified barriers with strong involvement of the broader interested public. These solutions, in form of new financing products, targeted information campaigns and changes to the existing regulatory framework will result in real and additional investments in sustainable energy. The main elements of SEFIPA will be • the Finance Lab, constituted of executive representatives of stakeholders groups who will work in regular sessions on the realization of solutions to the identified challenges for increasing SE investments. The outcome of the Lab will be at least 3 new financing instruments and 3 suggestions for adaptations of the regulatory framework for SE financing. • the implementation and operation of a crowd-investing platform designed to raise equity capital from a multitude of investors (the crowd) for SE projects in Austria. • the structured origination and implementation of SE investment actions utilizing the new financing instruments and regulatory changes. SEFIPA covers the whole spectrum of identification (call for investment actions, screening Lab members´ portfolios, conducting roadshows etc.), evaluation and implementation of investment actions. The consortium will monitor these actions in order to be able to provide a sound evaluation of the suitability and success of the realized instruments including their impact.

The objective of LOCALISED is to downscale national decarbonization trajectories consistent with Europe's net-zero target to the local levels and provide the results to local authorities, citizens and businesses, in a way that would speed up the uptake of mitigation and adaptation actions. To this end, the project will create effective and clearly understandable tools that transform localised data on possible decarbonisation pathways by 2030 and 2050 into knowledge for action, namely: (1) the Decarbonisation Profiler for municipalities, regions and their citizens, providing information in all 24 EU languages, and (2) the Net-Zero Business Consultant tool. The tools will allow local authorities and policy-makers as well as citizens and businesses: to identify viable combinations and best practices of (sectoral) mitigation and adaptation measures for every NUTS3 region on how to reach the goals of the downscaled pathways and to introduce an adapted-to-case service for implementation and monitoring of SECAPs. This is closing a gap as the few currently available European platforms providing information on energy transition to net-zero in Europe have so far limited their scope and results to the national level (EUCalculator, INNOPATHS, CTI-2050), which is of little use at the level where the changes must be implemented. The project will additionally engage with EU citizen groups to inform how climate change and different EU net-zero scenarios positively and negatively affect their life and what share of mitigation can be enhanced via key behavioural change. Three local and five associated partners from local and regional administrations and business organisations will inform the development and test the tools. They will also be instrumental in supporting upscaling and replication through local and European dissemination and networking.

EUCalc replies to topic a) Managing technology transition. The EUCalc project will deliver a much needed comprehensive framework for research, business, and decision making which enables an appraisal of synergies and trade-offs of feasible decarbonisation pathways on the national scale of Europe and its member countries + Switzerland. The novel and pragmatic modelling approach is rooted between pure complex energy system and emissions models and integrated impact assessment tools, introduces an intermediate level of complexity and a multi-sector approach and is developed in a co-design process with scientific and societal actors. EUCalc explores decisions made in different sectors, like power generation, transport, industry, agriculture, energy usage and lifestyles in terms of climatological, societal, and economic consequences. For politicians at European and member state level, stakeholders and innovators EUCalc will therefore provide a Transition Pathways Explorer, which can be used as a much more concrete planning tool for the needed technological and societal challenges, associated inertia and lock-in effects. EUCalc will enable to address EU sustainability challenges in a pragmatic way without compromising on scientific rigour. It is meant to become a widely used democratic tool for policy and decision making. It will close - based on sound model components - a gap between actual climate-energy-system models and an increasing demands of decision makers for information at short notice. This will be supported by involving an extended number of decision-makers from policy and business as well as other stakeholders through expert consultations and the co-design of a Transition Pathways Explorer, a My Europe 2050 education tool and a Massive Open Online Course.