The European Union (EU) has set itself ambitious climate change targets. The scale of investment needed to meet the energy savings targets alone is estimated at €180 billion p.a., three quarters of which is accounted for by energy efficiency in buildings. In light of the link between buildings and mortgages, the EU-funded Energy Efficient Mortgages Initiative (EEMI)[1] sought to bridge some of this gap by way of the energy efficient mortgage (EEM) product and framework. However, experience gained indicates the development of the EEM market goes far beyond designing the product and requires the integration of a complex web of stakeholders. The Energy Efficient Mortgage Market Implementation Plan (EeMMIP) will build on efforts to develop EEM by delivering an integrated market and a blueprint for established and emerging markets around the globe. The Project will conduct an analysis of the current market systems relevant to the development of an EEM market and establish demonstrators to support the demonstration of the end-to-end customer journey and EEM life-cycle. It will establish market-based governance and an EEM Label to support recognition of and confidence in EEM and facilitate access to quality information for market participants. It will deliver guidance for the inclusion of energy efficiency in credit risk assessments for lending institutions and supervisors and policy recommendations for the prudential framework in line with the principle of risk sensitivity and promote a well-functioning banking market. Finally, it will support global take-up of EEM through the Label and institutional cooperation. EeMMIP responds to the objectives of the EU in the areas of sustainable finance and climate change, all against the background of Capital Markets Union, and aims to influence the entire value chain, from consumer to bond investor, stimulating mentality change and securing energy efficiency in market attitudes and best practices both in Europe and globally.

The European Rare Diseases Research Alliance (ERDERA) aims to improve the health and well-being of the 30 million people living with a rare disease in Europe, by making Europe a world leader in Rare Disease (RD) research and innovation, to support concrete health benefits to rare disease patients, through better prevention, diagnosis and treatment. This Partnership will deliver a RD ecosystem that builds on the successes of previous programmes by supporting robust patient need-led research, developing new diagnostic methods and pathways, spearheading the digital transformational change connecting the dots between care, patient data and research, while ensuring strong alignment of strategies in RD research across countries and regions. Structuring goal-oriented public-private collaborations targeted at interventions all along the R&D value chain will ensure that the journey from knowledge to patient impact is expedited, thereby optimising EU innovation potential in RD. To support its ambition and missions ERDERA has been designed as a comprehensive and integrated ecosystem of which structure can be compared to an institute encompassing three main parts: (i) funding, (ii) internal (in house) Clinical Research Network that implements research activities targeting clinical trial readiness of RDs and accelerating diagnosis and translation of research discovery into improved patient care, and (iii) related supporting services (Data, Expertise, Education and Training) as well as an acceleration hub that serve external and internal RD community, all supported by all-embracing coordination and strategy and foundational (inter)national alignment.

In recent years, research has shown that energy savings resulting from energy efficiency improvements have wider benefits for the economy and society such as increases in employment, GDP, energy security, positive impacts on health, ecosystems and crops or resource consumption. In order to develop more cost-effective energy efficiency policies and optimised long-term strategies in the EU, these multiple benefits have to be accounted for more comprehensively in the future. Although this field of research is growing, the findings are disperse and mostly have important gaps regarding geographic, sectorial or technical measure coverage and findings vary largely. This makes a consideration of multiple benefits in policy making and policy evaluation difficult today. The proposed project addresses these issues and aims at closing the identified gaps by five central research innovations: 1) data gathering on energy savings and technology costs per EU country for the most relevant 20 to 30 energy efficiency measures in the residential, commercial, industrial and transport sectors, 2) developing adequate methodologies for benefit quantification, monetisation and aggregation, 3) quantifying the most important multiple benefits and where adequate, monetising, 4) developing an openly available calculation tool that greatly simplifies the evaluation of co-impacts for specific energy efficiency measures to enable decision-making and 5) developing a simple online visualisation tool for customisable graphical analysis and assessment of multiple benefits and data exportation. Project outcomes can thus directly be used by stakeholders and will help to define cost-effective policies and support policy-makers and evaluators in the development and monitoring of energy efficiency strategies and policies in the future.

The EU green deal and ambitious climate targets of the Nordic governments require massive private investments into energy efficiency of the Nordic building stock, electrification of heating and smart energy systems. Though a substantial part of the needed investments is profitable on paper, they are not actually carried out – an issue labelled the energy efficiency gap. For example, high transaction costs as a result of many points of contacts and lack of intuitive information makes energy renovations complex and unattractive for households. Also, lack of data hampers identification of buildings, which are ripe for energy efficiency renovations. A common denominator for the barriers is that financial institutions are in a perfect position to overcome them, through their touchpoint with end customers and ability to finance the investments. In this project, we will develop and market test concrete solutions to support Nordic financial institutions in overcoming the barriers. In concrete, we will do this by setting up a Nordic hub for Energy Efficient Mortgages, allowing us to leverage the already developed solutions within the initiative and previous research to which many consortium partners have contributed. The developed solutions will be demonstrated and tested in the market by Nordea, Swedbank and Hemma. The ultimate output of the project will be so-called blueprints for financial institutions on how to implement solutions to overcome the identified main barriers to energy renovations. This will be advanced throughout the Nordic banking sector through a comprehensive outreach campaign. The blueprints will showcase the value of a full-scale implementation to financial institutions as they are based on empirical tests within internal systems and response by end-customers. Thus, the blueprints will serve as a script to financial institutions to kick-start the much-needed renovation wave to be on track with the EU green deal as well as national climate targets.