Against the background of increasing quantities of waste from electrical & electronic equipment (e-waste), lacking recycling infrastructure for adequate treatment and lacking know how in this field, the project LaWEEda aims at strengthening Universities in Brazil and Nicaragua in their education in the field of e-waste management and entrepreneurship and collaboration with businesses. The LaWEEda consortium consists of 3 European universities, 4 Universities and 4 business partners in the target region.The project aims at improving the dialogue between research and practice by establishing regional Collaboration & Training Centres serving as knowledge hubs and interface, thus enhancing the quality of educational products. Further this improves the employability of graduates at University level and of practicioners at CPD-level and supports sustainable entrepreneurship. Developing and implementing new and innovative educational products along with the establishment of two Collaboration & Training Centres (one in Brazil and Nicaragua each) will lead to the following results:• Qualified graduates from Universities in e-waste management• Provision of trained and skilled workers as well as persons with entrepreneurial spirit and skills to start own businesses• Increasing employability of graduates and practitioners, inclusion of informal recyclers as socially deprived parts of society, improving social cohesion• Equipping education and training providers with modern teaching tools and approaches An improved information basis on available and lacking education will be created, the Collaboration & Trainings Centres developed, new and innovative educational products for academic use and for CPD evolved.For the LaWEEda Centres business plans were developed in order to ensure sustainability. Through the course of the project a wider network of stakeholders in e-waste management was established, aiming at a scaling up of the activities to other parts of Latin America.

High-Performance Computing (HPC), used to be promoted mainly by the big science and defence communities. However, with the recent advent of AI and IoT, wider use of HPC is bringing new benefits to areas such as industry, healthcare and the economy. All regions now see intense investments in HPC as an essential in order to compete globally. In this context, coordination and capacity sharing between allied regions is crucial. The RISC2 project will gather eight key European HPC actors, and the main HPC actors from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Chile, to encourage stronger cooperation between their research and industrial communities on HPC applications and infrastructure deployment. The project will be advised by an external Board made up of distinguished experts from Latin America and Europe. RISC2 will promote exchange of best practice through meetings, workshops and training, organised to coincide with major HPC events in Europe (like ISC and EuroHPCSW) and in Latin America (like CARLA and ISUM). RISC2 will build on the already strong relationships of the consortium partners; on the results of the previous RISC project, and on the use of platforms like the Ellalink Subsea Cable https://ella.link/. The main project deliverable will be a cooperation roadmap aimed at policymakers, the scientific community and industry, identifying key application areas, HPC infrastructure and policy requirements, and exploring ways for the activities established during the project to last beyond its lifetime. RISC2’s activities and results will be disseminated widely through dedicated project communication tools and will take advantage of existing platforms such as Campus Iberoamerica. The training carried out in the project will help capacitate Latin American HPC, and the structured interaction between researchers and policymakers in both regions will reinforce links and help define a coordinated policy and a clear roadmap for the future.

The overall objective of ACCLIMATE is to achieve enhanced integrated national and international strategies for climate-resilient, low-emission development. ACCLIMATE will contribute to improving the transparency, consistency, and clarity of GHG emission reduction commitments and create appropriate tools by developing an assessment framework for mitigation commitments. Working in a bottom-up manner with national experts within an international consortium comprising high-emitting countries from the Americas, Asia and Europe, as well as low-emitting countries from West Africa, ACCLIMATE will identify needs for improvements of NDCs and long-term strategies. A focus will be set on adequacy, fairness and feasibility, as well as on needs for improving current policies and measures to actually achieve NDCs and long-term objectives. On this basis, the development of enhanced national strategies and pathways will similarly build on existing scientific national expertise and models, with the development of enhanced pathways for all focus countries being undertaken by the respective partners of the consortium based in these countries, with support from European partners. These pathways will include an increased understanding of the role of ecosystems, non-CO2 gases, and climate impacts and risks, and socioeconomic tradeoffs. The development of enhanced pathways and policy recommendations will build on sectoral deep dives in order to fully capture sector-specific mitigation enablers and barriers. ACCLIMATE will in particular focus on the sectors industry, buildings, AFOLU, transport, and energy supply. ACCLIMATE will enhance the capacity in partner countries to develop and model mitigation strategies and pathways and to analyse and develop respective policy strategies and packages. Furthermore, enhanced strategies will be closely co-created with policy-makers and stakeholders at the national, sectoral and international levels.

As the world faces the risks of dangerous climate change, policy-makers, industry and civil society leaders are counting on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to inform and guide strategies to deliver on the objectives of the Paris Agreement (PA). ENGAGE rises to this challenge by engaging these stakeholders in co-producing a new generation of global and national decarbonisation pathways. These new pathways will supplement natural science, engineering and economics, traditionally represented in IAMs, with cutting-edge insights from social science in order to reflect multidimensional feasibility of decarbonisation and identify opportunities to strengthen climate policies. The pathways will be designed to minimise overshoot of the temperature target and analyse the timing of net-zero emissions to meet the Paris temperature target and reduce the reliance on controversial negative emissions technologies. In addition, they will link national mitigation strategies of major emitters with the PA’s objectives, integrate potential game-changing innovations, and advance conceptually novel approaches to architectures of international climate agreements. ENGAGE will also quantify avoided impacts of climate change, co-benefits and trade-offs of climate policy, and identify the biggest sectoral opportunities for climate change mitigation. In ENGAGE, we will set new standards of transparency for global and national IAMs. The new pathways will be developed in an iterative global and national stakeholder process and a consortium of leading global and national IAMs and social scientists. This co-production process ensures that the pathways are credible, legitimate, and rooted in concrete policy and industry experience, making them relevant to inform the 2023 global stocktake and feed into the mid-century strategies of major emitters.