ATHLETE aims to develop a toolbox of advanced, next-generation, exposome tools and a prospective exposome cohort, which will be used to systematically quantify the effects of a wide range of community-level and individual-level environmental risk factors on mental, cardiometabolic, and respiratory health outcomes and associated biological pathways during the first 2 decades of life, to implement acceptable and feasible exposome interventions, and to translate the resulting evidence to policy recommendations and prevention strategies. ATHLETE will establish a prospective exposome cohort, including FAIR data infrastructure, building on Europe’s most comprehensive already existing exposome data (18 cohorts in 12 European countries). ATHLETE will systematically characterise the effects of the exposome on early organ development, health trajectories, and biological pathways (metagenomic, metabolomic, epigenetic, ageing, and stress pathways), longitudinally from early pregnancy through adolescence. Innovative tool development will focus on: 1) complete and accurate measurement of multiple environmental risk factors (external/urban, chemical, physical, behavioural, social) through new targeted and untargeted exposure science approaches, 2) development of advanced statistical and toxicological strategies to analyse complex multi-dimensional exposome data, 3) development of interventions to reduce personal exposures, co-produced with the community, and 4) estimation of the societal impact of the exposome by calculating costs and child health impacts. ATHLETE’s strong focus on the vulnerable early stages of the life course, widespread general population exposures and common non-communicable diseases, its use of a large body of existing exposome data and expertise, its strong emphasis on knowledge translation, its development of an open online toolbox and its close collaboration in the European Human Exposome Network ensure that the objectives are achievable and highly relevant for future research and policy. ATHLETE is part of the European Human Exposome Network comprised of 9 projects selected from this same call.

The HARMONIE project takes a holistic approach to support informed policy- making by improving AP and noise monitoring, modeling, and forecasting as well as by providing tools to assess the health impact of actions on VP and the impact of actions in the long run on economy and sustainability of policies. The consortium will work in pilot cities to: 1) Enhance environmental monitoring and modelling by identifying key harmful variables. 2) Assess citizen exposure based on urban demographics, mobility, and vulnerability factors. 3) Evaluate health effects, both at the individual level (based on Digital Twin Lungs) and at the population level (computing mortality and morbidity). These components will be tested in real-world city scenarios, prioritizing pollution-abatement strategies. The methodology includes two key approaches: ● PILOTS: Data collection from Gävle (GAV), Sarajevo (SRJ), Lausanne (LAU), Barcelona (BCN) city and province, and Barakaldo (BRK), identifying vulnerable populations, monitoring pollutants (AQ & noise), and analyzing related health outcomes. ● DIGITAL TWIN: A Citizen-Centric Digital Twin (CCDT) will visualize pollution hotspots, engage citizens through interactive platforms, and integrate a social dynamics model to assess both health and healthcare system impacts under different scenarios. HARMONIE will enable ‘What-If’ scenario simulations within the CCDT, allowing policymakers to benchmark strategies and select optimal interventions. To ensure long-term impact, the project will integrate developments into existing city infrastructures, enhancing policy communication and decision-making with cutting-edge digital tools. By integrating community-driven data, What-If scenarios, and behavioral insights, it helps overcome psychological and social barriers to zero-pollution initiatives. Through dynamic simulations and feedback mechanisms, it engages citizens and institutions to develop actionable strategies tailored to urban communities.

Air pollution is a major problem for public health. According to WHO outdoor air pollution kills 4 million people, mostly in cities, every year. That’s more than HIV, malaria and influenza combined. Air pollution is estimated to cost approximately 2% of Gross Domestic Product in developed countries and 5% in developing countries. The problem is only increasing with the unprecedented population growth in cities. In Europe, over one in four and one-third of cities surpass the legal limits set by the EU legislation regarding NO2 and PM10 respectively, pollutants that affect seriously the respiratory system. However, current air quality monitoring stations in cities are spatially very limited due to the high capital and operative expenditures. Consequently, a small number of them are installed in cities mainly used just for air quality regulation. Bettair is a Platform as a Service that permits, for the first time with low investment, to really map air an noise pollution in cities on a previously unimaginable scale based on a large deployment of outstandingly accurate gas sensors by using an advanced post-processing algorithm. The network of autonomous devices is installed in streetlights (or similar) in a dense matrix and assist cities to i) identify unknown pollution sources, and ii) to assess the impact of different environmental actions to identify the most effective ones. Thus, providing unique insights and allowing better decisions to mitigate air pollution and reduce individual exposure. We need the FTI project to internationally bring to market the developed technology, from a prototype to a product, by industrialising the hardware and scaling-up the platform. Two big and two small pilots will be carried out in order to demonstrate the accuracy, the performance, and the benefits of using such a system. The consortium has 2 innovative EU SMEs Bettair Cities and Omniflow; 2 big corporates CISCO and Telecom Italy; and a leading health research centre, ISGlobal.

SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with Citizen Science (CS) through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours aligned with environmental policy objectives and between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment. This idea is emphasised in this project through the metaphor of bees’ behaviour (with queens, working and drone bees as main CS actors), interested stakeholders that aim at learning from results of CS evidence-based research (honey bears) and the Citizen Science hives as incubators of CS ideas and projects that will be tested in three different pilot sites (Ancona, Marousi and Ancona) and with different population: elderly people, everyday commuters and young adults, respectively. The SOCIO-BEE project ambitions the scalable activation of changes in citizens’ behaviour in support of pro-environment action groups, local sponsors, voluntary sector and policies in cities. This process will be carried out through low-cost technological innovations (CS enablers within the SOCIO BEE platform), together with the creation of proper instruments for institutions (Whitebook and toolkits with recommendations) that will contribute to the replication, upscaling, massive adoption and to the duration of the SOCIO-BEE project. The solution sustainability and maximum outreach will be ensured by proposing a set of public-private partnerships schemes and innovative targeted communication means to streamline exploitation and accessibility to the project impacts.