To reach carbon neutrality, cities must adopt new, more adapted energy models for urban mobility, relying on zero-emission and active mobility modes. The uptake of sustainable mobility solutions relies on their inclusivity, affordability and safety, as well as their consistency with users’ needs. Through co-creation activities and innovative digital tools, the AMIGOS project will identify present and future mobility challenges for 5 cities (living labs) and 10 urban areas (safety improvement areas). The digital tools include a Mobility Observation Box and an application for the collection of new mobility data, which will feed a big data platform for their analysis and digital twins to visualize mobility scenarios. They will allow urban stakeholders to identify mobility challenges and will serve as a basis for the co-development of adapted mobility solutions: towards reducing traffic, increasing public and active mobility modes, improving safety and co-habitation between different mobilities for the 5 cities, and towards increased safety for the 10 urban areas. Therefore, key stakeholders such as public authorities and vulnerable users will be included in the definition of technological and policy solutions mobility solutions which will be implemented in the cities. Their environmental, safety, economic and social impacts will be assessed, in addition to their medium- and long-term impact and their replicability, in view of their implementation in 5 twin cities.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GAME NEED AND SOLUTION FOR THE NEED: Experienced in sustainability education and certification and somewhat frustrated by the levels of abstraction and bureacuracy involved, the participating schools have identified a need to rejuvenate schools' interest in rich, meaningful and fun work with environmental, economic, cultural and social sustainability. In an era of accessible digital game design and great youth interested in gaming, we intend to develop a monopoly-like Sustainable Development Game (SD-game for short) where whole schools, groups of stakeholders within schools and individual classes can plan and record sustainability actions in their community. OBJECTIVES: The project has the tangible goal of developing a prototype of a playable online SD-game that will take middle and high schools' sustainability work to the next level. However, through engaging students in a technology-assisted, cooperative design project, the project also aims at developing the participating students' broad-based competences (e.g. critical thinking, social skills, digital skills) required by today's school curricula and working life. Participating teachers gain experience of guiding students through such skill development, which spills over to their other work and serves as an example of modern, curriculum-required pedagogy in the participating schools. PARTICIPANTS: The project has three middle school partners: Sammonlahti school in Finland, Le collège Saint-Étienne in France and Kolding Realskole in Denmark. Work is planned such that there is a core team of teachers and students involved in various different roles throughout the project, but the project will touch all members of the participating schools. Four non-school actors in Finland are official project partners and bring different sustainability and digital expertise to the venture: Lappeenranta region environment office, Saimaa media center, Seepia Games game development company and Okka foundation offering sustainability certification to Finnish schools. Three universities with expertise in various academic aspects of sustainability function as advisory partners. ACTIVITIES AND METHODOLOGY: The project will progress through three years of game development and consist of the following main stages: research, manuscript (= parameters of the game) and visualisation (Year 1), creating the game (Year 2), and prototype piloting and further development (Year 3). Design-Oriented Pedagogy and other methods of student-centered, skill-oriented learning will be employed in the course of the project. Work will progress through an initial Learning, Training and Teaching Activity, two annual Transnational Project Meetings and local work and digital cooperation in between. IMPACT: At the end of the project, various dissemination activities will take place to spread information and experiences of the SD-game to interested municipal, regional, national and European actors advocating sustainability education. We expect many seconary schools to be interested taking the SD-game into play and in this way, the project will impact the sustainability attitudes and actions of thousands of youth in Finland, Denmark, France and most likely beyond. The project participants will gain an experience of a shared, significant and meaningful undertaking that will stay with them for life.

Climate change impacts are here and now. The impacts on people, prosperity and planet are already pervasive but unevenly distributed, as stated in the new EU Blueprint strategy (European Commission-EC, 2019). To reduce climate-related risks, the EC and the IPCC agree that transformational adaptation is essential. The TranformAr project aims to develop and demonstrate products and services to launch and accelerate large-scale and disruptive adaptive process for transformational adaptation in vulnerable regions and communities across Europe. The 6 TransformAr lighthouse demonstrators face a common challenge: water-related risks and impacts of climate change. Based on existing successful initiatives, the project will develop, test and demonstrate solutions and pathways, integrated in Innovation Packages, in 6 territories. Transformational pathways, including an integrated risk assessment approach are co-developed by means of 9 Transformational Adaptive Blocks. A set of 22 tested actionable adaptive solutions are tested and demonstrated, ranging from nature-based solutions, innovative technologies, financing, insurance and governance models, awareness and behavioral change solutions. The project team, led by the University of Antwerp, gathers 22 partners from 11 countries and a well-balanced mix of sectoral and adaptation experts (5 RTOs and 1 SME), paired with 6 territories (4 local authorities and 2 charities), 8 additional solutions providers and 1 EU water-related NPO specialized that will support to structure a European Community of practice. Massive resilience increase and acceleration of transformation adaptation will be fostered by clustering various investors, testing bankable solutions, and defining viable (non-)commercial exploitation strategy for the TransformAr solutions, products and services.

The PATTERN project’s general objective is to improve practitioners’ capacity for decision making on climate and environmental policies, by developing an interactive online platform for the economic appraisal of policies and measures. To reach this general objective, the project will develop an operational integrated economic appraisal approach (WP3 and 4), deliver guidelines to bridge ex-post and ex-ante analyses (WP1), build and demonstrate an effective participatory process to create 5 Theories of Change (WP2), build a European Community of Practice for climate and environmental policymaking (WP6), and create a One-Stop-Shop for all policy and decision makers to access and use the project results easily. PATTERN will thus provide decision-makers, stakeholders, and the public with more realistic and operational ability to systematically assess their policies and their consequences. It will provide a basis for improving (i) methodologies, techniques and models for conducting economic appraisal of climate and environmental policies (ii) the broader policy evaluation framework and practices currently used in European countries and their regions and (iii) tailored analysis and engagement strategies structures for the participation and co-creation with relevant stakeholders and key actors to enhance operational capacities and improve the impact of European policies on climate and environment. Overall, results obtained from in-depth ex-post and ex-ante analysis of the PATTERN’s 5 case studies will bring new evidence on the effectiveness of various types of regulatory strategies, instruments and approaches for climate and environmental policies and insights for the design and evaluation of the implementation of major European policies.

The textile industry is the fourth largest industry in the world with the global volume of fiber production for textile manufacturing reaching 110 million metric tons in 2020. At the same time, the textile industry is one of the most polluting industries worldwide with the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions corresponding to 10% of the global emissions. Polyester (PET) is the most widely used fibre in the industry, making up 52% of the global market volume. No technology available today is capable of addressing the textile industry’s sustainability and virgin PET produced from primary petrochemical sources remains predominant with a fossil fuel consumption of 98 Mt annually which is expected to reach 300 Mt by 2050. Addressing the key challenges of carbon neutrality, circularity, cost, value chain adaption, and textile properties is the ambition of Threading-CO2, a disruptive project that will demonstrate on an industrial scale a first-of-its-kind technology that converts CO2 waste streams into sustainable PET textiles. Threading-CO2 aims to scale-up and demonstrate its first-of-its-kind technology producing high-quality commercially viable sustainable PET textile products from CO2 waste streams at industrial scale (TRL7) using a circular manufacturing approach and running on renewable energy sources. The overall outcome of the Threading-CO2 project is a 70% GHG emissions reduction compared to existing PET manufacturing processes. In addition, Threading-CO2 will enable the creation of a European value chain for sustainable PET textiles, from feedstock to final textile products in the clothing, automotive and sports/outdoor industries.