The overarching aim of INHERIT is to define effective inter-sectoral policies and interventions that promote health and well being across the social gradient by tackling key environmental stressors and related inequalities in the areas of living, consuming and moving. INHERIT will bring together relevant stakeholders from different sectors, including the private sector. It will support inter-sectoral cooperation between environment, climate and health by: a) Analysing existing scientific knowledge on key environmental stressors to health and approaches to address these; b) Identifying existing promising inter-sector policies and interventions that enable conditions for more healthy and environmentally sustainable behaviours, in three main areas: living, consuming and moving; c) Developing a Common Analytical Framework using impact assessment tools and quantitative and qualitative indicators to assess the social, environmental and health benefits and the economic value in promising inter-sectoral interventions; d) Developing targets and future visions while considering overall economic and politics contexts and global trends (i.e. participatory back-casting, stakeholder and citizen consultations and household surveys); e) Implementing, testing and evaluating pilot interventions in different European contexts; f) Enhancing the leadership skills of public health professionals in inter-sectoral work to address key environmental stressors to health and promote healthy and environmentally sustainable lifestyles; g) Translating evaluation findings into models of good practice for effective inter-sectoral work and evidence based tools for policy development to contribute to the global and European environment, health and sustainable development policy agenda. The novelty of INHERIT lies in its support for health, environment and climate sectors to jointly pursue the inter-related goals of improving health and well-being of the population while preserving the environment.

Primary prevention of cancer through behaviour changes in adolescence – a critical period in which many risk behaviours are initiated –, is a huge health and societal challenge in Europe. In alignment with this need, SUNRISE will co-create, implement and evaluate an innovative digitally-enhanced life-skills programme for primary prevention of cancer through sustainable health behaviour change in adolescents, tailored to their socio-economic, cultural and environmental diversities. SUNRISE will combine an established, evidence-based digital solution for smoking prevention, with novel intervention approaches such as peer social media campaigns, advertising literacy training, educational games, and social robot platforms, to take cancer prevention approaches for adolescents in the EU to the next level. The digitally-enhanced programme and its components will be developed through co-creation with schools-as-living-labs methods involving multiple societal actors such as educators, adolescents, parents, public health experts, and policy-makers. The programme will be implemented and evaluated at large scale across 154 schools and 7500 students in urban and rural regions of 8 European countries - Greece, Switzerland, Slovenia, Spain, Cyprus, Italy, Belgium, Romania -, including socially disadvantaged groups such as migrants and ethnic minorities. The effectiveness of both methods for achieving long-term health behaviour change, as well as the implementation strategy for solution adoption and multi-country sustainability, will be evaluated. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Prevention & early detection (behavioural change).

The DietWise advances the state-of-the-art by proposing systemic changes, a focus on inclusion, and open social innovations with the aim of developing solutions that streamline existing tools and applications to foster healthy and sustainable food provision and to make cooking, eating, and treating of food at home the most attractive choice for all stakeholders. Using disruptive new approaches and voluntary market self-regulation, our activities will help to dampen nutritional noise gradually and organically merge cultural and commercial practices with a healthier and sustainable food consumption pattern. Next, we will empower citizens with novel, citizen science-based solutions that will shift the role citizens play – away from passive actors influenced by the food environment to citizens as active participants influencing their decisions and helping to create better digital food environments. The project will generate multiple novel insights to empower citizens to make healthy and sustainable choices and original empirical evidence through 'big data' analysis, large-scale surveys, qualitative research, and micro-level experiments. From a methodological point of view, we will harness novel state of the art methods, such as using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with deep learning techniques to analyze big online data. Finally, we will integrate scientific and empirical findings into social innovations powered by AI and develop user-oriented tools to support citizens. As a result, our methodological and empirical advancements will provide a deeper understanding of how various external system-level environmental factors shape attitudes and beliefs towards healthy and sustainable food provision and cooking, how to motivate consumers to follow nutrition guidelines, how to include the ones who are in greatest need, and how to help citizens shape digital food environments.