Climate change is one of several drivers of recurrent outbreaks and geographical range expansion of zoonotic infectious diseases in Europe. Policy and decision-makers need tailored monitoring of climate-induced disease risk, and decision-support tools for timely early warning and impact assessment for proactive preparedness and timely responses. The abundance of open data in Europe allows the establishment of more effective, accessible, and cost-beneficial prevention and control responses. IDAlert will co-create novel policy-relevant pan-European indicators that track past, present, and future climate-induced disease risk across hazard, exposure, and vulnerability domains at the animal, human and environment interface. Indicators will be sub-national, and disaggregated through an inequality lens. We will generate tools to assess cost-benefit of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors and scales, to reveal novel policy entry points and opportunities. Surveillance, early warning and response systems will be co-created and prototyped to increase health system resilience at regional and local levels, and explicitly reduce socio-economic inequality. Indicators and tools will be co-produced through multilevel engagement, innovative methodologies, existing and new data streams and citizen science, taking advantage of intelligence generated from selected hotspots in Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Bangladesh that are experiencing rapid urban transformation and heterogeneous climate-induced disease threats. For implementation, IDAlert has assembled European authorities in climate modelling, infectious disease epidemiology, social sciences, environmental economics, One Health and EcoHealth. Further, by engaging critical stakeholders from the start, IDAlert will ensure long-lasting impacts on EU climate policy, and provide new evidence and tools for the European Green Deal to strengthen population health resilience to climate change.

Our common heritage is a central element of our communities and economies, and a principal but vulnerable dimension of our common identity as Europeans. It has been proven that cultural heritage contributes to well-being, social cohesion, identity, local economy, territorial attractiveness, and environmental sustainability, but the climate crisis and natural hazards endanger this heritage. We propose RescueME to take immediate action for demonstrating how an innovative data-driven, community-based, heritage-centric actionable landscape approach to resilience enhancement can protect our cultural heritage and landscapes while supporting the transition toward a green society and economy that sustains resilient, cohesive, nature-connected communities. RescueME proposes a call for action, broadening the scope, triggering action, untapping and mobilizing resources, engaging actors, and facilitating the decision making and the implantation of co-created just resilience solutions to protect our common heritage. RescueME will develop, test and demonstrate the effectiveness of an Actionable Framework based on the Resilient Historical Landscape approach (RHL) complemented by data, models, methods, and tools able to assess risks and opportunities, co-develop inclusive and just resilience strategies and innovative solutions to protect European cultural heritage and cultural landscapes from climate change, disaster risk, as well as other stressors (such as pollution and over-tourism) with special focus on European coastal landscapes since a large share of this endangered heritage there. The five case studies (Psiloritis in Creta, Neuwerk in Hamburg, Portovenere, Cinque Terre & the Islands, València and the city of Zadar) have been selected carefully as complementary representatives of European coastal landscapes. They will act as resilience landscape laboratories (R- labscapes), validate the results and ensure their replicability.

Europe’s urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of healthy, affordable, safe and sustainably produced food. Such challenges converge within local food environments, but are often neglected by public planners. Promising initiatives taken by municipalities to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the wider policy context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are: (1) siloed ways of working and (2) fragmentation of knowledge on facilitators and barriers related to food system transformation. These factors hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies. FOODCLIC will create strong science-policy-practice interfaces across eight European city-regions (45 towns and cities). The backbone of such interfaces will be provided by Food Policy Networks, which will manage real-world experimental Living Labs to build a policy-relevant evidence-base through learning-in-action. Activities will be informed by an innovative conceptual framework (the CLIC), which emphasizes four desired outcomes of food system integration (sustainability co-benefits, spatial linkages, social inclusion and sectoral connectivities). Capacity-building and direct support for intensive multi-stakeholder engagement (including deprived and vulnerable groups) will enable policy actors and urban planners across partner city-regions to develop continuously evolving integrated urban food policies and render planning frameworks food-sensitive. Results will be communicated and disseminated amongst others by extending the novel policy practices to another eight city-regions in Europe and Africa, an online Knowledge-Hub, a high-level Think Tank and partners’ networks. In these ways, FOODCLIC aims to contribute to urban food environments that make healthy and sustainable food available, affordable and attractive to all citizens (including deprived and vulnerable groups).

C-BLUES will significantly advance knowledge and understanding of blue carbon ecosystems (BCEs) seagrasses, tidal marshes, mangroves, macroalgae, and macroalgae mariculture aiming to achieve three overarching objectives: 1) develop new scientific knowledge within BCEs to reduce scientific uncertainty and improve reporting of blue carbon under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2) provide input to a possible revision of the 2013 IPCC Wetlands Supplement to increase inclusion of coastal wetlands in national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories and reporting, 3) raise awareness and promote the role of blue carbon for delivering global climate policy commitments in collaboration with Chinese and other international partners. C-BLUES will perform the following: produce spatial maps, methodological best practices and standard operating procedures; enable more robust and reliable quantification of carbon emissions and sequestration; model sequestration capacity and upscale regional and global GHG budgets; assess carbon stock changes, GHG emissions and removals related to different management interventions and human activities; review legal and institutional frameworks governing BCEs; and assess the drivers and barriers for integrating coastal wetlands into national reporting mechanisms under the UNFCCC. C-BLUES will target the following Mission Ocean Lighthouse Areas (LA): LA Atlantic/Arctic, LA Baltic and North Sea, and LA Mediterranean Sea. The Black Sea, Dutch Antilles, and through collaboration with China, the Southern China coast will also be covered. C-BLUES will engage with the scientific community, climate and coastal policy makers and the wider civil society to disseminate the knowledge generated, raise awareness of BCEs and build capacity for blue carbon research inclusion. C-BLUES will effectively impact national and international climate policy work so that BCEs more prominently are included in reporting and management actions.

The ambition to achieve the Paris Agreement goals has led to the realization that a rapid and full decarbonization of the economy is required, involving a structural transition of the current economy and society. With the rise of quantified policy targets, policy packages, and consideration of multiple dimensions and sectors, Integrated Assessment Models with their ability to consider complex relationships and provide calibrated numerical results have become ever more important in the last decade. The PRISMA project aims to bring these models to the next level by focusing on four key areas of improvement, namely the representation of distributional justice and efficiency, innovation and finance, climate impacts and land-use implications, and lifestyle change and circularity. In these four key areas we will improve existing large-scale IAMs and sectorial models, and consider the linking of different models where applicable. Two cross-cutting shared themes across these areas are the improvement of the temporal and spatial resolution of the analysis, and the representation of disruptive and structural change in the economy. Notably we will increase the spatial granularity with a focus on Europe, and look at the yearly and in particular near term detailed modeling of rapid decarbonization pathways. The extensive model development will be co-designed through an interactive stakeholder engagement process from the beginning, and focus on model openness and usability to ensure the stakeholder and policy relevance. Moreover, PRISMA will focus in its application on the analysis of the spectrum of Fit for 55 package policies of the EU developing focalized robust and resilient Net zero pathways and assess the uncertainty around key variables and outcomes. PRISMA will also provide key insights to international climate assessments, a large number of open modelling tools and databases, including capacity building and dissemination activities for all countries.