Ensuring a sustainable food system requires, above all other factors, re-entrusting our primary production to the guardians of our territory, the owners of small- and medium-sized farms and farm structures in rural areas. GUARDIANS focuses on understanding their challenges and empowering them with a set of digital innovative solutions that will help them to bridge the current technological gap between small and large farms. GUARDIANS will put in place a set of cost-effective and human-centric digital solutions, which aim to support and empower the penetration, sustainability and resilience of more agroecological farming models, like regenerative agriculture, natural grazing, alternative managed grazing strategies, and the promotion of pollinators in different farm structures. To do this, a multi-actor co-creation methodology, a set of adoption pathways and 9 different technologies, combining software and hardware (i.e. drones, sensors), will be customized to cover the farmers' needs. These digital solutions will be tested through a total of 24 small- and medium-sized farms and farm structures with a wide range of production types (arable crops, woody crops, grassland and livestock production) in 6 pilots represented by farming cooperatives (acting as one stop shops) from 5 different countries with diverse environmental, climatic and socio-economic conditions. As a result, GUARDIANS will increase the uptake of innovative digital technologies by farmers, guaranteed by the use of a multi-actor approach, integrating farmers and agricultural stakeholders at all stages of the project, as well as scientists, technicians and SMEs. Cascade funding and connections to specific stakeholders (agricultural cooperatives, agrifood hubs, DIHs, OGs) will be used as multipliers to allow GUARDIANS to roll up its impact throughout Europe. It is expected to roll-out and replicate GUARDIANS results up to 92 farms around Europe during the project duration.

As part of the EU strategic agenda to build a climate-neutral and green Europe, increasing energy efficiency of industry is among the priorities of the Green Deal. Process heat has a significant weight in the total energy demand of the European industry and increased energy efficiency of industry through the recovery and upgrade of waste heat is one of the first steps towards decarbonization in the industrial sector. Although different heat upgrade technologies exist, their wide deployment is not taking place due to different technical and non-technical barriers hindering the uptake. PUSH2HEAT will aim to overcome these implementation barriers and push forward the market potential and business models of heat upgrade technologies by real full scale demonstration of different heat upgrade systems in relevant industrial sectors with high waste heat recovery and upgrading potential, with supply temperature in the range 90-160ºC. Different heat upgrade technologies will be scaled-up to optimize their efficiency and economic performance and demonstrated in selected industrial demo-sites covering a representative sample of the most relevant industrial processes with heat recovery potential. Economic and country specific regulatory barriers, summed up to the technical ones, greatly influence the deployment of the heat upgrade technologies. To tackle this, PUSH2HEAT intends to demonstrate suitable busines models and dedicated exploitation roadmaps for a higher penetration of heat upgrade systems aiming to contribute to meet the industry decarbonization targets. For achieving its ambitions, PUSH2HEAT consortium gathers different heat upgrade technology manufacturers, industrial end-users where demonstrations will take place, engineering and business oriented companies as well as expert RTD partners in the field, together with the European association representing the heat upgrade technologies stakeholders.