The HIGHLANDS’ goal is to contribute to Inclusive Sustainable Development in Highlands (ISDH) through collective and impact-driven Research & Innovation (R&I), based on capacity building, sharing of local-global knowledge, experience, and tools. It will drive a co-innovation process through secondments and research and innovative sessions (R&IS) involving public/private and non-academic partners, to build a shared vision of ISDH, enhance the capacities of researchers, managers, users, policymakers, thus bridging the gap between research and development. Our activities will be organized in 5 integrated work packages (WP): Coordination & management (WP1); Methodology & capacity building for ISDH (WP2); Analysis, comparison and modelling of ISDH (WP3); Building a multi-actor ISDH Decision-Support Platform (DSP) (WP4); Communication, Dissemination & Exploitation of results (WP5). HIGHLANDS is supported by a network of 43 institutions including 31 partners from Europe (~35% non-academic), and skilled and motivated female and male researchers and local stakeholders. The work plan will run 8 successive R&IS (5 in Europe, 3 outside) to promote the exchange among participants as a foundation for innovation. Each R&IS will build upon collective learning principles and a holistic systemic approach, exposing participants to a wide range of world views that will encourage experimentation with practice. Each R&IS will focus on a particular aspect of sustainable highland development and will include collective learning, collaborative research, and capacity-building on data collection/analysis, modeling. To complement the R&IS, long-term secondments will be implemented for researchers and practitioners to deeply train and work together on specific issues identified by the consortium. Collected data on ISDHs will be stored in an online collaborative and interactive decision-support platform that will then be transferred to existing mountain networks.

The impacts of climate change on people, planet and prosperity are intensifying. Many regions and communities are struggling to avoid losses and need to step up the effort to increase their climate resilience. Ongoing natural capital degradation leads to growing cost, increased vulnerability, and decreased stability of key systems. Therefore, the European Mission on Climate Adaptation acknowledges the need to adopt a systemic approach by working across sectors and disciplines, experimenting, and involving local communities. NBRACER steps up to this challenge with an innovative and practical approach to accelerate the transformation towards climate resilient regions that are safe, green, clean, healthy, and just. Adaptation will be based on the smart packaging of nature-based solutions (NBS), rooted in the resources supplied by biogeographic landscapes, and embedded in a transformative action approach that mobilizes and enables regions and communities to accelerate forward. NBRACER works with Demonstrating and Replicating regions in the European Atlantic biogeographical area to vision and co-design place based sustainable NBS that are at one with the regional landscapes, upscaling these into coherent regional packages and building time and place specific adaptation pathways integrating local solutions and regional scales. This process is supported by a regional scale effort to build adaptation journeys with community support, with input from teams testing and validating place based NBS solution portfolios situated in landscapes. Innovative technical and adaptation transformation support packages provide quantitative mapping methods and a transformative action approach and capacity building, and networking enable scaling out and building connections. Led by Deltares, advanced in climate adaptation science, the consortium builds synergy from the strength of practitioners, ecosystem engineers, innovators of transformative adaptation, finance, and capacity building experts.

EcoChestnut offers an innovative vocational training process to support the development of organic chestnut production in Europe, integrating into a common curriculum all aspects of development of organic farming, processing & production of chestnut products (farming techniques, production methods, marketing, communication, ethics & corporate social responsibility). The EU chestnuts market has been experiencing a strong growth in demand and production for organic chestnut products for the last 10 years. Due to the development of the consumers demand, the European chestnuts market is unsatisfied in volume, so it has to rely on non-EU imports to be satisfied (Turkey, China, Korea). Thus, it is important that industry professionals (producers & farmers) have the key skills & competences to match & keep up to these challenges. It is a question of considering organic chestnut production not only from a technical point of view, but also in all aspects of the producer's relationship with its customers & its territory. All partners have executed various EU projects on agriculture and have partnered with many farmers and agricultural producers. During their joint activities, all partners have come to the finding that a lot of the farmers & producers recognize the great demand for organic products. Their managers shared that they have significant interest to enter this market segment, but they lack information about the specific steps they should undertake. They have informed the partners that some courses in organic farming exists on the educational market, there is absolutely nothing (not even a single course within a broader VET course or university programme) for organic chestnuts farming & production. Based on all these needs, the partners have decided to develop EcoChestnut – a designated training course following b-learning, multidisciplinary & comprehensive approach to meet the specific needs for a course in organic chestnuts & chestnut products (OCCP) directly targeted towards the farmers & producers. Therefore, the project target groups shall be:- chestnut growers & chestnut-products companies wishing to converse to organic farming but lacking comprehensive & integrated training materials. - new chestnut entrepreneurs who do not come from the agricultural world. - multi-skilled farmers who can make an interesting supplementary production to allow the reuse of the traditional chestnut groves.The aim of the project is to enhance the competitiveness of the EU chestnuts farmers and producers through development of their potential for production and promotion of OCCP.The main objectives shall be:- to enhance the development opportunities and boost the growth potential of EU chestnut farmers & chestnut products producers by entering a market of OCCP;- to develop specific knowledge and competences in the EU chestnut farmers & chestnut products producers to produce and promote OCCPs;- to provide transversal, multidisciplinary and tailor-made training on OCCP production and promotion in response to the specific needs of the chestnut farmers & chestnut products producers;- to remind & develop awareness that the chestnuts & chestnut groves are part of the cultural, historical and landscape heritage of the country;- to increase the support provided to the chestnut farmers & chestnut products producers to enter the market of OCCP;- to encourage the application of organic farming and production approaches among new & existing chestnut farmers & chestnut products producers;- to promote use of sustainable agricultural farming and OCCP production methods among EU farmers & producers;- to promote wider use of organic chestnuts and chestnuts products among EU customers.EcoChestnut project shall envisage the development of:- EcoChestnut Learning Model- Thorough & interactive course in OCCP production & marketing- Manual for trainers- Platform with interactive repository section- Guide on certification of organic chestnuts- Handbook “Utilize the potential of the chestnut groves”.The expected impact on national & EU levels are:- cover the needs for new, multidisciplinary, experience-oriented and user-friendly approaches for development of professional competences of farmers, agronomists and chestnuts producers in production of chestnuts & chestnut products;- development an integral pack of training course, Manual for trainers & Guide on certification of organic chestnuts that is applicable on EU level and to all interested in this topic;- improvement of the competitiveness of the chestnut producers on the common European market through production of qualitative chestnuts and chestnuts products;- raised awareness of the plantation managers on the possibility to explore a new niche for their business by applying traditional & eco-friendly methods for growing of the chestnuts & production of organic chestnut products and promoting them as part of the intangible legacy of their country.

<< Objectives >>The project intends to create a coherent set of activities, on how students in secondary education can reach out to the environmental treasure outside of their schools and develop inner skills allowing them to analyse and communicate the aforementioned treasure.In so doing, students will be able to analyse any form of the environmental situation presented before them, grasping its needs, unique qualities, and threats even beyond those taught by the school curricula.<< Implementation >>The partners will implement 5 work packages:WP1 Project Management and CoordinationWP2 Capacity building workshops for teachersWP3 Creating environmental experiencesWP4 Learning through the local environment WP5 Promotion and Awareness Raising<< Results >>The project will support the education of students in one of the most sensitive areas for the current status of our societies - sustainability and climate change. The participants, teachers and students, will be able to benefit from a deeper connection to the environment and become enlightened regarding the most recent principles of sustainability, through innovative digital technologies to make this message relevant and modern.

The ecological and social unsustainability of our food systems is widely acknowledged by scientists, citizens and governments around the world. To address the challenge of sustainable transitions, agroecology is also increasingly recognised as a promising model and the territorial scale as an appropriate scale of analysis and action. ATTER will develop an interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral exchange program to help filling the lack of knowledge and methodology for scaling out agroecological transitions for territorial food systems. It will gather researchers and practitioners around cross-case studies work through secondments, trainings and workshops, relying on the specificities of the five countries under study (France, Italy, UK, Brazil and USA) and on the complementary expertise and skills of the 18 participating organisations (10 academic and 8 non-academic). We will manage the ATTER network as an action-research eco-system to boost the emergence and dissemination of knowledge, innovations and tools for the agrifood systems’ transitions. The specific objectives of ATTER are to i) build a portfolio of 15 regionally embedded case studies representing diverse agroecological transitions and trajectories and transform this portfolio into a lasting observatory; ii) based on this portfolio, elaborate a typology of transition pathways in diverse contexts; iii) develop evaluation approaches and tools aimed at integrating the different dimensions involved in agrifood transitions; iv) analyse the effects of policy instruments and facilitating approaches and define policy recommendations and context-sensitive methodological frameworks aimed at facilitating these transitions; v) develop a diversity of adapted training and exchange activities both for academics and practitioners, which will allow more than 100 staff members to develop new skills, discover new research environments and expand their career perspectives, as well as to consolidate a wider and lasting network.