SUSTCERT4BIOBASED project is set on fostering the adoption of effective and robust sustainability certification schemes and business-to-business labels for industrial biobased systems to support tracing the sustainability of biobased products along the value chains and trades within the EU and globally for responsible production and consumption. To this end, a monitoring system will be developed with a life-cycle perspective along four themes (environment, social, economic and governance) considering the complexity and relationships of all dimensions of sustainability and the rules and procedures on how the schemes are managed. This system will be optimized with pilot audit in practice and testing on existing schemes/labels for biobased systems evaluating their performance in the different themes and their coverage of the list of minimum requirements. Costs and benefits from the adoption of certification schemes and labels will be assessed, considering actual economic as well as internalized environmental and social ones. Data will be generated on volumes of biological resources and biobased products in global trade flow and extent of their certification. We will leverage the results of the project to provide best practices and recommendations to 4 key target groups: policy makers, sustainability system community, industrial biobased value chain actors, and regional/rural bioeconomy stakeholders. Our vision is that this will result in harmonized system requirements, continuous improvement and enhanced adoption of sustainability certification schemes and labels, and provide a significant contribution towards establishing a circular and sustainable bio-based industry for Europe contributing to the Bioeconomy Strategy and Green Deal. The large multi-sectorial stakeholders involvement (through an international Network of Interest domain and a comprehensive Advisory Board) will enable SUSTCERT4BIOBASED to increase outreach and aligning with ongoing international efforts.

Community energy sits high in the energy policy agenda as an inseparable part of the strategy towards a low-carbon EU economy. Sustainable biogas technologies have been extremely slow in catching up with community energy developments, failing to benefit from their undeniable potential. ISABEL aims to remove the obstacles and to promote community biogas in the EU by bringing out its societal relevance and by joining forces with a major revolutionary movement – Social Innovation. To achieve and sustain this transition, ISABEL employs modern marketing research to understand the needs and cultural diversities of the communities, fuses Social Innovation to reposition Biogas from an economic bio-fuel carrier to a social good, to come up with new community concepts and to build a stronger and wider community engagement in support of biogas. We zoom in on specific areas with diverse interest and we support communities on the ground to realize community biogas plans in coordination with all the stakeholders, slashing transaction overheads. We bring communities together to exchange and inspire each other as we carefully steer them towards quality sustainability and impact assessment principles. We zoom out to inform the policy world about what works and what does not, what should change and how we can scale-up, replicate and innovate in order to make investments more attractive. We envision a more innovative, better connected, less sensitive to policy and more transparent community biogas movement which will serve as a spring of ideas for other renewable energy technologies. But we start simple – we want more ideas, more and deeper public involvement, more responsible community biogas plans and more bold and fair policies; and we bring along a highly complementary team of practical minded people to do it.

InnoRate is set on deploying a trusted, objective and recognised service platform across the EU and AC to support and improve the decision-making processes of investors and lenders for vetting, prioritising and providing access to finance to innovative high growth potential SMEs. The suite of digitally-enabled decision support tools and services provided through our platform are underpinned by well-customised innovation assessment and rating methodologies that go beyond the unsuitable, backward-looking and costly practices currently employed, so as to evaluate and signal the technological and business potential and risks of market-creating innovations, efficiently and cost-effectively. To this end, we leverage semantic technology, existing data sources and in-depth human expertise, to minimise the time and resources (human and financial) required by investors and lenders in this respect, reducing knowledge / information asymmetries and ultimately risk premiums paid by innovative project managers. In doing so, our ambition is clearly to disrupt the largely risk-averse financial sector of the EU and AC, enhancing the innovation capacity of high growth technology sectors and SMEs, paving the way for drastical innovations to flourish and placing Europe in the forefront of the global innovation game. To put it simply, we want to bring innovation to finance and finance to innovation.

ΜΟΒΙ-TWIN argues that major global transition processes, such as green and digital transition, require to constantly redefine the changing nature of regional attractiveness for capturing shifts in the drivers and effects of spatial mobility. It builds on the idea that twin transition affects regional attractiveness -or otherwise, the drivers of human mobility- offering an opportunity to left-behind areas to attract new population based on characteristics related to living and environmental conditions and the changes it brings on job accessibility. It argues that this creates new spatial mobility patterns which tend to develop new equilibria between the different forms of mobility (permanent, circular, temporal), affecting both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ sending and receiving regions. It uses biga data and agent-based modelling to analyse the impact of those changing patterns of spatial mobility on EU regions and envisage policies to counterbalance their effects in terms of demographics, society, welfare system and labour market. The project has a four-dimensional scope: (i) it will analyse the changing drivers of spatial mobility based on human mobility behaviour, encompassing the structural changes caused by twin transition in the definition of regional attractiveness; (ii) it will examine the new balance rising between the different forms of spatial mobility (permanent, circular, temporal) and their effects on EU regions following the changing nature of regional attractiveness; (iii) it will use agent-based modelling to capture and assess the impact of changing patterns of spatial mobility on EU regions in terms of demographics, society, welfare system and labour market; and (iv) it will use the insights to envisage place-based policies for harnessing the positive outcomes of twin transition. Specific attention will be placed on the ways in which the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 and Brexit have affected freedom of movement between EU regions.

Although decentralized and utility-scale renewable energy sources have grown, the EU must speed up their deployment to meet decarbonisation targets. Outdated grid infrastructure, limited system flexibility, complex regulatory frameworks, and rising NIMBY attitudes hinder the full market integration of these plants, affecting their business models and service monetization. Addressing these issues is essential for both facilitating the deploying of new utility-scale RES plants and maintaining previously existing ones and its viability. To achieve this, LUMENS will implement a comprehensive strategy built on three key pillars: (1) Establishing a multi-actor engagement framework to ensure a strong stakeholder dialogue and capacity building, providing the project with valuable feedback from the sector. (2) Creating a dynamic repository of knowledge transfer materials (KTM), including success stories and recommendations based on a portfolio of cases that will be studied throughout the development of LUMENS, as well as an open-source toolkit composed by analytical and decision-support tools that will aid in a variety of aspects, such as location, sizing, hybridization or market performance prediction of a RES plant. (3) Executing a continuous knowledge transfer strategy that promotes direct interaction with key international market players. With a consortium of nine partners from seven EU countries, including market operators, power system operators, RES promoters, and multidisciplinary research experts, LUMENS is well backed up to develop actionable insights for optimizing key factors including the planning, location, operation, and monetization of utility-scale RES plants among others. Ultimately, LUMENS seeks to enhance the competitiveness of RES plants in the EU energy market, particularly utility-scale infrastructures, by promoting secure, cost-effective energy solutions and advancing the path toward net-zero emissions.