Considerable challenges remain today regarding Europe´s transition towards a decarbonised energy system that meets the economic and social needs of its citizens. Rebound effects, that is, a full or partial cancelling-out of efficiency gains over time through increased overall energy use, highlight the centrality of consumption in multi-scalar decarbonisation efforts, urgently requiring attention from scientists and policy makers. Calls also abound for innovative, research-led programmes to enhance the social acceptability of energy transition initiatives and technologies. Understanding how culture-specific views and practices and energy policy and governance both shape and reflect individual and collective energy choices is of paramount importance for the success of the Energy Union. ENERGISE responds directly to these challenges by engaging in frontier energy consumption scholarship. Recognising the persistence of diverse energy cultures, both within and between countries, ENERGISE offers an ambitious social science programme to enhance understanding of changes in energy consumption practices across 30 European countries. Moving beyond state-of-the-art research, ENERGISE theoretically frames and empirically investigates socio-economic, cultural, political and gender aspects of the energy transition. It also examines how routines and ruptures (re)shape household energy consumption practices. Adopting a cutting-edge Living Labs approach, designed specifically to facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, ENERGISE fuses tools for changing individual- and community-level energy consumption with a novel method for energy sustainability assessment. ENERGISE will open new research horizons and greatly enhance Europe’s capacity for high-impact, gender-sensitive consumption research. It also offers timely support for public- and private-sector decision-makers who grapple with the design and implementation of measures to effectively reduce household energy consumption.

CIMULACT has as a main objective to add to the relevance and accountability of European research and innovation – Horizon 2020 as well as national - by engaging citizens and stakeholders in co-creation of research agendas based on real and validated societal visions, needs and demands. The project will expand the outlook and debate on STI issues, increase scientific literacy in a broad sense, which includes the understanding of the societal role of Science, Technology and innovation (STI), and create shared understanding between scientific stakeholders, policy-makers and citizens. This multi-actor approach will embrace EU28 plus Norway and Switzerland. The CIMULTACT builds on the principle/conviction that the collective intelligence of society gives Europe a competitive advantage, which may be activated to strengthen the relevance of the European science and technology system. By establishing genuine dialogue between citizens, stakeholders, scientists, and policymakers visions and scenarios for the desirable futures will be developed and debated, and transformed into recommendations and suggestions for research and innovation policies and topics. In short, CIMULACT will ● Create vision and scenarios that connect societal needs with future expected advances in Science and their impact on technology, society, environment etc. in connection to the grand challenges ● Provide concrete input to Horizon 2020 through recommendations and policy options for R&I and simulated calls for the Horizon2020 Work Programmes. ● Engage citizens and stakeholders in a highly participatory debate/consultation/process on scenarios for desirable sustainable futures and research ● Build capacities in citizen and multi-actor engagement in R&I through development, experimentation, training and assessment of methods for engagement ● Facilitate dialogue and shared understanding between policymakers, citizens, and stakeholders ● Reveal the relative merits of the citizen focussed consultations

All over Europe, a good level of knowledge about Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) development has been reached. There are different good quality methodologies and guidelines available. However, currently municipalities struggle to implement these action plans. There are different reasons for that; one of the most important is the fact that often municipal employees do not feel engaged and are not motivated to take any sort of actions and initiatives, unless someone has actually “obliged” them. In many cases, this lack of engagement and commitment ends up with investments in energy efficiency that do not deliver expected technical and economic outcomes. Hence, the energy efficiency potential is not fully exploited and worse suboptimal investments do not provide expected yields. Moreover, local authorities (LAs) more often are facing also challenges regarding climate resilient infrastructure and climate adaptation. The level of knowledge and understanding is even scarcer as regarding climate mitigation. COMPETE4SECAP is designed to deliver a systematic approach to energy savings in local authorities using energy management systems (EnMS) according to ISO 50001 or European Energy Award with dedicated online monitoring tool and energy saving competitions. EnMS and competitions when combined can trigger significant benefits by providing innovative and efficient way to involve municipalities that have already their SEAPs but do not act in order to foster their integrated development at local level. Trained and engaged municipal employees will be able to better implement energy efficiency projects, which then require higher investments. An EnMS will help the LA to have reliable data for informed decision and further help in monitoring and evaluation of implemented projects. The use of renewable energy and integration of climate adaptation will also be facilitated through EnMS with the set of procedures from an environmental management system (e.g. IS0 140001).

save@work focusses on overcoming the barriers to energy saving practices in public office buildings and changing the behaviour of public sector employees at work place. A minimum of 9000 employees in at least 180 public office buildings (administrative buildings - municipal/regional or federal state operated) from nine countries will compete in a year-long energy saving contest to achieve the highest energy savings possible compared to the previous year. Throughout the competition participants will benefit from expert knowledge provided by the partners; a web-based Energy Saving Online Tool (feedback system) which helps to visualise actual energy consumption and savings made by each building; tailor made information and campaign materials and the exchange of experience with other participants. The energy saving competition between public office buildings is embedded in an energy quality management system: Analysis – Development of Measures – Implementation – Monitoring and Continuation, which ensures an individual, professional goal-oriented and sustainable approach for realising energy savings. It is projected that the project will lead to 13 GWh primary energy saved and 3,100 t of CO2 avoided in public buildings across Europe. Support from behavioural change experts and an accompanying evaluation of the implemented measures and results will help provide important insights useful for both project implementation as well as future initiatives in this field. Factors of success, barriers and the impact of the project in respect to mid- and long-term changes will be analysed. Project activities and results will be disseminated through a wide communication campaign to the public, as well as other stakeholders in public administrations and academic institutions. By providing a complete set of strategies and materials needed to replicate this project, our goal is to inspire others to follow our lead and develop energy efficient offices of the future.