ClimEmpower will empower five south-European regions with high Climate Change (CC) risk and exceptionally low adaptive capacity to enhance their CC-resilience, establish the regional Communities of Practice (CoP) and co-create the resilient development strategies adapted to the regional needs and potentials. We will achieve this through combination of user-driven climate applications, capacity building and "best practices" transfer from other European projects and regions. Throughout the project the ClimEmpower team will aid the regional administration in organizing the regional CoPs where representatives of "quadruple helix" stakeholders will discuss their Climate Adaptation needs and capabilities, assess potential pathways towards CC-resilient, societally just, and sustainable future and elect sustainable and CC-resilient regional development pathways that are best suited to their needs and capabilities. This activity will be supported by provision of the data driven Decision Support service(s) for strategic CC-adaptation planning, as well as through provision of easy to understand educational materials illustrating the CC risks and possible technological, natural and societal adaptation options and strategies, explaining the use of the project tools, as well as knowledge transfer on existing data, tools and best practices in climate adaptation from successful EU projects and regions with higher adaptive capacity. ClimEmpower will develop new generic interface to C3S Climate Data Store, data driven CC-hazard and -risk assessment services, and semi-semi-quantitative (“screening”) services allowing the users to compare different adaptation strategies. These services will primarily rely on open data and open service infrastructure and on cross-linking of such data with data that can be sampled locally during the project - to complement the pan-European data, improve granularity or to validate the predictions.

AGROECOLOGY, the European Partnership ‘Accelerating Farming Systems Transition: Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures’, is an ambitious, large-scale European research and innovation endeavour between the EC and 26 Member States (MS), Associated Countries (AC) and Third Countries. AGROECOLOGY will support an agriculture sector that is fit to meet the targets and challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, food security and sovereignty, and the environment, while ensuring a profitable and attractive activity for farmers. Major change is needed to make the agriculture sector more sustainable, resilient and responsive to societal and policy demands. Agroecology builds on natural, biological interactions while using state-of-the-art science, technology and innovation based on farmers’ knowledge. It represents a promising approach with the potential to respond to challenges faced by the European agriculture sector and to meet its needs. Real-life testing and experimentation environments, living labs are an appropriate instrument to accelerate the agroecology transition. Research infrastructures will also contribute to making scientific knowledge on agroecology available for this transition. Together these instruments will allow for ambitious experimentation at different scales, merging science and practice, to provide science-based evidence on the effects of novel approaches and accelerate the agroecology transition. AGROECOLOGY will pool the resources of the EC and the states involved to fund high-level research generating appropriate knowledge and technologies aligned with the core themes described in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, while also implementing a series of supporting activities to inform, consult, advise and involve different stakeholders to build capacities, raise awareness and manage and exchange the knowledge and data created.

Europe’s regional authorities have a crucial role to play as agents of just, inclusive and resilient economic development for their territories. ROBIN sets out to empower them to fulfil this role with support to co-shape their governance structures and models in ways that accelerate the deployment of their circular bioeconomy targets, while also promoting social innovation and accounting for different territorial contexts. To this end, we establish and demonstrate the potential of innovative circular bioeconomy governance structures and models in 5 European Regions within Ireland, Germany, Spain, Slovakia and Greece. Our journey begins by setting-up Multi-Actor Regional Constellations engaging key quadruple helix stakeholders to co-create and work alongside novel governance structures, well-embedded within existing organisational structures of our regions and mandated to coordinate and execute circular bioeconomy strategies with and for the entire actor ecosystem and to coordinate effectively with the CCRI-CSO. Along the way, we provide them with tailored support for enhanced and more inclusive stakeholder engagement, as well as a practical toolbox to improve the design, operation and monitoring of their governance models. In parallel, a monitoring and evaluation framework will gauge the performance and impact of our support actions and tools, providing quantifiable evidence of their economic, social and environmental impact. We will use this evidence to engage over 10 additional European regional authorities to test our tools and make a concrete case for their transferability, while also offering mutual learning and capacity building opportunities. In the process we coordinate our actions with the CCRI-CSO and complementary European initiatives to facilitate the dissemination of our results, ensuring their long-term sustainability as viable solutions for supporting EU regions in adopting governance models that facilitate the transition to a Circular Bioeconomy.