Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

The continuous increase of the scope and the scale of the anthropogenic activities in which agriculture plays a significant role contributes to a rapid negative impact on the carbon cycle. The impact of agriculture on CO2 emissions will be further increased, considering that the world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 . EU has committed to mitigate the carbon footprint from agriculture as described in the CAP (Objective 4), the European Green Deal and its flagship strategies, the Farm to Fork and the Biodiversity strategies. The efficiency of these carbon footprint from agriculture strategies will be mainly determined by the synergy amongst all stakeholders (policy, industry, academia, civil society) in the quadruple helix within the place-based innovation ecosystems. The widening countries involved in this project, Cyprus, Greece and North Macedonia, as part of the Balkan-Mediterranean region, are heavily impacted by climate change. To achieve these targets an inter- and transdisciplinary approach is required to integrate the expertise and knowledge of all relevant stakeholders and a place-based perspective and design needs-based carbon farming solutions (practices and technologies) as well as strict policies to foster shifts towards a Climate-resilient Agriculture. The main objective of this project is to establish CARBONICA Excellence Hub by connecting the innovation ecosystems of Cyprus, Greece and North Macedonia, while enhancing their TRL as service providers, based on cutting-edge technologies (Earth Observation – EO; in situ data; digital agriculture etc.) in carbon farming. The main scope is to establish access to excellence to all relevant stakeholders in the QH of the WC, as well as strengthen regional innovation capacity guided by long-term joint R&I strategy in the carbon farming field.

ICAERUS proposes an “application-oriented” approach, through the selection of five (5) specific drone applications, to explore the multi-purpose application potential of drones in agricultural production, forestry and rural communities. The selected drone applications represent the most important sectoral and societal drone usage purposes in Europe and cover multiple applications that are interconnected within the complex rural European landscape. The ICAERUS vision is to explore opportunities and provide a more complete and interconnected account of the potential and impact of drones as multi-purpose vehicles in EU agriculture, forestry and rural areas. The aim is to showcase and support, through application, the effective, efficient and safe deployment of drones as well as, identify the risks and added values associated with their use. “Taking off” from the current state-of-the-art in the drone ecosystem, ICAERUS will “rise up” by advancing existing software technology, platform components and knowledge in regard to drones, to exploit the potential of drones and strengthen capacities to reduce their risks, achieve better informed decision-making, enhance sustainability performance and competitiveness in agriculture, forestry and rural areas. This will be showcased in two directions: fundamental applications representing an “eye-in-the-sky”, using the drone as a positioning system for optical observation and recording, and a “hand-in-the-sky” applications, for spraying and goods delivery. ICAERUS plans to scale-up through research, technology optimisation, demonstration and education about drones to create an efficient, trusted and safe enabling environment for the EU drone services market to achieve the EU’s decarbonisation, digitalisation and resilience ambitions. ICAERUS consists of a balanced, multi-actor, cross sectoral and well-experienced consortium, including research organisations, SME technology providers, associations and non-profit organisations.

CODECS will co-develop, together with farmers and AKIS actors, user-friendly approaches, methods, and tools able to document the co-benefits and the costs of technologies applied to real contexts. In this way, it will improve the collective capacity to understand, assess and foresee the full range of benefits and costs of farm digitalisation, and to build digital ecosystems that maximise the net benefits of digitalisation. CODECS will develop a vision of “sustainable digitalization” which will contribute to a multi-level transition that links social, economic, and ecological aspects together, by adopting an innovative system based / actor centred approach, and an action research methodology based on coordination of 21 Living Labs through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams. The research will study the role of 'digital ecosystems' in the rate of uptake of digital technologies and in the distribution of their costs and benefits; will develop and test three indicators (farmers' digital readiness, scaling readiness, digital ecosystem conduciveness) to monitor the level of digitalisation and foresee its potential costs and benefits. It will assess and compare the full range of social, economic, and environmental costs and benefits of farm digitalisation, identifying synergies and trade-offs between different sources of costs and benefits; it will test and demonstrate digital technologies in 21 Living Labs through in physical and virtual demonstration. The CODECS platform will host search, demonstration, and assessment tools. CODECS has a strong commitment to get an impact in the AKIS domain and in the policy field, which will be put into practice through a dedicated work package on policy analysis and policy tools (iii) a set of policy briefs and webinars and an engagement strategy at local, national, European level through Living Labs, a science-policy interface, an AKIS network and a demo-farm network.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as powerful tools for sustainable environmental monitoring, playing a vital role in comprehending the diverse effects of climate change on ecosystems. The integration of state of the art techniques such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) with UAV technology has introduced innovative pathways for various environmental applications. However, their full potential remains to be explored. ACCELERATE proposes the development of a fertile inter-discipline and inter-sectoral ecosystem that aims to radically contribute towards enhancing UAV technology to enable the sustainable environmental management. The specific objectives of the project are to: a) Create a continuously updated ecosystem with UAV datasets suitable for environmental studies and climate change impact assessment, b) promote methodological advances in the field of UAVs technology, by exploiting the unique capabilities of those data with state-of-the-art techniques and c) establish clear guidelines and homogenized protocols for the characterization of the exploitation of UAVs in specific application domains. Experimental analysis will also be carried to showcase the practical use of the project outputs via four carefully selected and innovative Use Cases, that will serve as Key Performance Indicators of the project. ACCELERATE brings together enthusiastic staff from academia and industry via a series of carefully-designed secondments, establishing a unique fertile collaborative research and innovation environment to promote pioneering research in environmental and socioeconomic studies implementation within urban, natural and agricultural environments. A strong inter-sectoral experienced research team of 17 partners from 9 countries, of 8 academic and 8 industrial partners coming from Greece (2), Romania (3), Italy (2), Cyprus (1), United Kingdom (4), North Macedonia (1), France (1), Germany (1) and Portugal (1) constitute the project’s Consortium.