Natural hazards, such as extreme weather events, are exacerbated by climate change. As a result, emergency responses are becoming more protracted, expensive, frequent, and stretching limited available resources. This is especially apparent in rapidly warming regions. MedEWSa addresses these challenges by providing novel solutions to ensure timely, precise, and actionable impact and finance forecasting, and early warning systems (EWS) that support the rapid deployment of first responders to vulnerable areas. Specifically, MedEWSa will deliver a sophisticated, comprehensive, and innovative pan-European–Mediterranean–African solution comprising a range of complementary services. Building on existing tools MedEWSa will develop a fully integrated impact-based multi-hazard EWS. This call contained five expected outcomes, all of which will be specifically addressed by MedEWSa. Led by WMO, MedEWSa will be an exemplar of the UN Secretary General’s March 2022 call to ensure that everyone on Earth is protected from extreme weather and climate-related hazards by EWS within the next five years. Through eight carefully selected pilot sites (areas in Europe, the southern Mediterranean, and Africa with a history of being impacted by natural hazards and extreme events with cascading effects), four twins will be created: ● Twin #1: Greece (Attica) – Ethiopia (National Parks): wildfires and extreme weather events (droughts, wind) ● Twin #2: Italy (Venice) – Egypt (Alexandria / Nile Delta): coastal floods and storm surges ● Twin #3: Slovakia (Kosice) – Georgia (Tbilisi): floods and landslides ● Twin #4: Spain (Catalonia) – Sweden (countrywide): heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. The twins will bridge areas with different climatic/physiographic conditions, yet subject to similar hazards, and are well positioned to deliver long-term bi-directional knowledge transfer. They will demonstrate the transferability and versatility of the tools developed in MedEWSa.

As it is addressed by the European Plastics Strategy (European Green Deal & Circular Economy Action Plan 2.0), new methods to reliably calculate, verify and report the recycled content in products need to be developed, boosting the increase of recycled content in everyday products against the use of virgin materials. However, measuring the recycled content is complex, requiring product tracing to the production source. PRecycling aims to develop an easy-to-use methodology for sorting, sampling, tracing and recycling plastic waste streams, including detection and separation of legacy additives, along with standard analysis procedures for both plastic waste materials and recyclates (secondary raw materials) in order to produce consistently high quality, safe-to-use recyclates based on their degradation degree and added-value products with predicted lifetime. Smart tracing via digital systems will be developed in parallel, to ensure the quality and safety of reused materials, targeting a sustainable, transparent and functional Circular Economy Model for the recycling market. The environmental and financial viability of PRecycling solutions will be assessed throughout life cycle and cost analysis in order to reach competitive prices of recycled products. The above will be demonstrated, producing (I) home appliances components, (II) toys/learning resources, and (III) 100% recycled textile, starting from the same sector recyclates and different European regions. However, the proposed methodology in PRecycling could be adapted by many other sectors, i.e. packaging, vehicles, and electric/electronic equipment, triggering significant societal impact apart from commercial and industrial interest. Demonstration activities will serve as part of a community awareness initiative, showing that 'from waste to product' transformation is scalable, replicable, traceable, commercially viable and most importantly, safe to use, both within the same and new supply chain products.

Whilst citizen participation in environmental policy making is still in its infancy, there are signs of a growing level of interest. The majority of citizens, though, both as individuals and as groups often feel disengaged from influencing environmental policies. They also remain unaware of publicly available information, such as the GEOSS or Copernicus initiatives. The SCENT project will alleviate this barrier. It will enable citizens to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers by monitoring land-cover/use changes in their everyday activities. This is done through a constellation of smart collaborative technologies delivered by the SCENT toolbox in TRLs 6-8: i) low-cost and portable data collection tools, ii) an innovative crowd-sourcing platform, iii) serious gaming applications for a large-scale image collection and semantic annotation, iv) a powerful machine-learning based intelligence engine for image and text classification, v) an authoring tool for an easy customization by policy makers, vi) numerical models for mapping land-cover changes to quantifiable impact on flood risks and vii) a harmonization platform, consolidating data and adding it to GEOSS and national repositories as OGC-based observations. SCENT will be evaluated in two large scale demonstrations in Kifisos Attica and Danube Delta. Our consortium covers the complete stakeholder chain: industries in machine learning (IBM), SMEs in crowd-sourcing (U-Hopper), gaming (Xteam) and awareness raising (Carr), leading research institutes with expertise in hydrodynamic modelling (UNESCO-IHE), data harmonization and authoring tools (ICCS) and environmental monitoring (DDNI), NGOs at the pilot sites (HRTA, SOR) and policy makers/public bodies (Region of Attica). The SCENT initiative will go beyond the current project and form a European-wide citizen movement, created and fostered by the SCENT stakeholders, that will ensure its sustainability and its complementarity with existing citizen partnerships.

EIFFEL will offer the EO-based community the ground-breaking capacity of exploiting existing GEOSS and external datasets, with minimal new data collection activities. Added-value services interoperable with GEOSS will be designed, using cognitive search and metadata augmentation tools based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Natural Language Processing. These tools will leverage advanced cognitive features to extract meaningful information from and enrich GEOSS metadata. Moreover, novel methods (super resolution, data fusion) for augmenting the spatiotemporal resolution of explored EO data will be proposed, in order to address the needs of the diverse EIFFEL CC adaptation and mitigation applications. The latter will cover: (i) a set of five different GEO Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs), namely in Water and Land Use Management, Sustainable Agriculture, Transport Management, Sustainable Urban Development and Disaster Resilience domains; (ii) various EU geographical and climatic regions, at local, regional, national, cross-border and pan-European scales. Further, the value of using explainable AI techniques for improving the credibility and comprehensiveness of such CC applications, so that they can offer actionable insights to the decision makers, will be showcased. EIFFEL will foster the co-design of CC adaptation policies and mitigation strategies and monitor CC effects in the respective regions. The project, in line with EuroGEO’s emphasis on early engagement with stakeholders and their participation in the application design, has ensured that they are active consortium members. EIFFEL complies with the framework of results-Oriented GEOSS, to improve the delivery of applications tailored to decision making centres and will actively participate in the GEO Work Programme post-2019. Last, it provides tangible proof of the value of GEOSS data for creating CC applications and encourages projects and initiatives to offer their data through the portal.

GOBEYOND is an innovation action that will develop and test Multi-Risk Impact-based Early Warning System (MR-IEWS) platforms for geohazards and weather/climate events adapted to support Civil Protection Authorities and first responders in their situational awareness and rapid deployment in Europe, countries of the Union for Mediterranean (UfM), and beyond. For this end, GOBEYOND will capitalise on the legacy of EWS for high-impact geo and weather/climate events, and on the impact-forecasting algorithms from previous projects of the consortium. GOBEYOND will identify most innovative algorithms for geohazards and incorporate them with available weather/climate impact-based algorithms into a common IEWS. These algorithms will be integrated with high-resolution vulnerability, exposure and risk information at regional and local levels to describe the severity of the hazards in terms of the expected socio-economic impacts to evolve towards a real-time DSSs. MR-IEWS will be co-designed in a participatory framework in which authorities, citizens, and civil society representatives can feel listened to, and actively engaged in co-design and co-creation roles. GOBEYOND will test the MR-IEWS platforms developed for international (Europe and UfM countries), regional and municipal environments. This will be done through the 5 regional demonstrations in Andalusia (ES), Attica (EL), Campania (IT), a Canton in Switzerland and the Al Hoceima province (Morocco). A sixth demonstration in 4 EU municipalities will test advanced capabilities as communication services based on the latest developments on Site Specific Warnings, crowdsourcing techniques, artificial intelligence, SMS Cell Broadcast, and capacities to trigger actions from regional emergency and self-protection plans. The platforms will run in 6 real-time 24/7 operational demonstrations during 24 Months of the project to test them in real-time under conditions of operational use, achieving TRL 7 and 8.