CINEA reinforces its support to research and innovation actions in the area of climate change through the signature of grant agreements with 14 new projects.
The funding amounts to €94,522 million awarded to proposals submitted for the Call H2020-LC-CLA-2018-2019-2020: Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: climate action in support of the Paris Agreement of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials.
The selected projects will support Europe’s journey towards climate neutrality by 2050 under the Green Deal and the new EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change.
They will do this by developing a new generation of Earth System models for better future climate projections (Topics LC-CLA-18-2020), improving our understanding of the polar processes in a global context (LC-CLA-17-2020), foster climate resilience of European coastal cities and settlements (LC-CLA-13-2020) and develop artificial intelligence methods for the detection and attribution of extreme events.
As part of their work, these projects will also investigate reversibility, impacts and adaptation needs in case of Paris Agreement overshooting (LC-CLA-12-2020) and provide scientific support for designing mitigation pathways and policies (LC-CLA-10-2020).
Examples of funded projects
4I-TRACTION
Summary
The European Green Deal needs to work simultaneously towards climate neutrality across the economy rapidly enough to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals, while delivering on a broad range of issues, from competitiveness and productivity to employment and health. Based on a stocktake of existing climate policies and their performance, it will spell out a number of policy avenues and an overarching governance framework, to describe how the current mix of EU climate and energy policies needs to evolve in the 2020s to set course for climate neutrality by 2050. The analysis will be structured around four crosscutting core challenges, the “4 I’s”: Innovation, Investment, Infrastructure, and Integration of solutions across sectors.
Project full title: 4I-TRACTION - Innovation, investment, infrastructure and sector Integration: transformative policies for a Climate-neutral European Union.
EU contribution: €3,997 million.
Topic: H2020-LC-CLA-10-2020.
Duration: 36 months.
Partners: Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Belgium, Finland, Spain
CAMPAIGNers
Summary
Climate change is a human problem: caused by humans, affecting humans, and requiring a human-centred solution. CAMPAIGNers aims to make low-carbon lifestyles a major part of the solution by identifying lifestyles transformation potential, and associated barriers and enablers across five continents and 16 major cities with over 20 million residents.
The project’s ground-breaking approach implements a ‘goal-setting network’, where over 100,000 citizens receive and create challenges to try out tailored adaptations to their daily routines via an engaging app.
Project full title: CAMPAIGNers - Citizens Acting on Mitigation Pathways through Active Implementation of a Goal-setting Network
EU contribution: € 4,999 million.
Topic: H2020-LC-CLA-10-2020.
Duration: 36 months.
Partners: Austria, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Finland, Belgium, Greece, France, Sweden, Lithuania
XAIDA
Summary
Often, extreme events provide representations of the future climate but not all extremes are harbingers of the future. Thus, in order to be useful for adaptation in support to future projections, a causal link between events and human influence on climate must be established or refuted.
Using new artificial intelligence techniques, and a strong two-way interaction with key stakeholders, the project will characterize, detect and attribute extreme events using a novel data-driven, and an impact-based approach. It will assess their underlying causal pathways and physical drivers using causal networks methods.
The project will also simulate high-intensity and yet unseen events that are physically plausible in present and future climates.
Project full title: XAIDA – Extreme events: artificial intelligence for detection and attribution
EU contribution: € 5,999 million.
Topic: H2020-LC-CLA-12-2020.
Duration: 48 months.
Partners: France, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Switzerland
SCORE - Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Coastal Cities
Summary
The intensification of extreme weather events, coastal erosion and sea-level rise are major challenges to be urgently addressed by European coastal cities. Science behind these disruptive phenomena is complex and advancing climate resilience requires progress in data acquisition, forecasting, and understanding of the potential risks and impacts for real-scenario interventions.
The Ecosystem-Based Approach (EBA) supported by smart technologies has potential to increase the climate resilience of European coastal cities.
SCORE outlines a co-creation strategy, developed via a network of ten coastal city ‘living labs’ (CCLLs), to rapidly, equitably and sustainably enhance coastal city climate resilience through EBAs and sophisticated digital technologies. The project will establish an integrated coastal zone management framework to strengthen EBA and smart coastal city policies, creating European leadership in coastal cities climate change adaptation, in line with The Paris Agreement.
Project full title: SCORE - Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Coastal Cities
EU contribution: € 9,980 million.
Topic: H2020-LC-CLA-13-2020.
Duration: 48 months.
Partners: France, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Switzerland
The examples of projects funded by CINEA clearly demonstrate where the priorities of the European Union lie and how the Union tries to achieve its goals. Firstly, these projects are inclusive: a great deal of emphasis is placed on citizens and participants are not only EU Member States; the UK, Norway, Turkey, Switzerland, and even South Africa are involved in many of these projects. Moreover, they combine the most pressing and recent issues with climate change, such as the CAMPAIGNers project. And finally, the projects utilise state-of-the-art technologies such as the usage of AI and innovative efforts in the field of climate change.
ECOPNET (European Cooperation and Partnership Network), as non-protfit civil society organisation seeking to bring all of Europe together, is very much encouraged by such projects that span the entire continent and its peoples and how these projects make use of the newest technologies. ECOPNET also wishes to influence and contribute to the formulation or implementation of policy and the decision-making processes of the EU institutions on selected subject matters.
Source: European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency