SCOREwater focuses on enhancing the resilience of cities against climate change and urbanization by enabling a water smart society that fulfils SDGs 3, 6, 11, 12 and 13 and secures future ecosystem services. We introduce digital services to improve management of wastewater, stormwater and flooding events. These services are provided by an adaptive digital platform, developed and verified by relevant stakeholders (communities, municipalities, businesses, and civil society) in iterative collaboration with developers, thus tailoring to stakeholders’ needs. Existing technical platforms and services (e.g. FIWARE, CKAN) are extended to the water domain by integrating relevant standards, ontologies and vocabularies, and provide an interoperable open-source platform for smart water management. Emerging digital technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data are used to provide accurate real-time predictions and refined information. We implement three large-scale, cross-cutting innovation demonstrators and enable transfer and upscale by providing harmonized data and services. We initiate a new domain “sewage sociology” mining biomarkers of community-wide lifestyle habits from sewage. We develop new water monitoring techniques and data-adaptive storm water treatment and apply to water resource protection and legal compliance for construction projects. We enhance resilience against flooding by sensing and hydrological modelling coupled to urban water engineering. We will identify best practices for developing and using the digital services, thus addressing water stakeholders beyond the project partners. The project will also develop technologies to increase public engagement in water management. Moreover, SCOREwater will deliver an innovation ecosystem driven by the financial savings in both maintenance and operation of water systems that are offered using the SCOREwater digital services, providing new business opportunities for water and ICT SMEs.

The objective of InnoForESt is to spark a transformation of the European forest sector by stimulating innovations for the sustainable supply and financing of forest ecosystem services. The project will support the governance of viable innovations and a multi-actor network by building on pioneer policy tools and business models, by establishing new alliances, and by involving key stakeholders from forest and forest-related policy, administration and business. InnoForESt will establish six real world pilots that represent a range of successful coordination approaches and business models. The project will facilitate the transfer and up-scaling of existing niche models identified and the development of new innovations, to demonstrate the feasibility of alternative income streams from a diverse set forest ecosystem services. The case study regions represent a variety of biophysical conditions and institutional settings across Europe. The core elements of InnoForESt are: (i) multi-actor networks, (ii) digital and physical innovation platforms, (iii) facilitated innovation processes for business and policy making, (iv) information generation and support for future national and EU forest policy making. Within the networks, stakeholders will exchange ideas, knowledge and practices. InnoForESt has already engaged a broad set of practice partners to establish the core of the networks. The innovation platforms will function as hubs and as spaces for exchange and learning. The project will scale up the results to the European level, making use of the thorough understanding of Europe’s social-ecological landscape as well as sustainability impacts of different governance mechanisms. The lessons will feed into a roadmap for the provision of forest ecosystem service bundles and a broad range of dissemination and communication activities. Ultimately, this will lead to better policy coordination, the well-being of EU citizens and the ecological integrity of forest ecosystems.