The continuous increase of the scope and the scale of the anthropogenic activities in which agriculture plays a significant role contributes to a rapid negative impact on the carbon cycle. The impact of agriculture on CO2 emissions will be further increased, considering that the world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 . EU has committed to mitigate the carbon footprint from agriculture as described in the CAP (Objective 4), the European Green Deal and its flagship strategies, the Farm to Fork and the Biodiversity strategies. The efficiency of these carbon footprint from agriculture strategies will be mainly determined by the synergy amongst all stakeholders (policy, industry, academia, civil society) in the quadruple helix within the place-based innovation ecosystems. The widening countries involved in this project, Cyprus, Greece and North Macedonia, as part of the Balkan-Mediterranean region, are heavily impacted by climate change. To achieve these targets an inter- and transdisciplinary approach is required to integrate the expertise and knowledge of all relevant stakeholders and a place-based perspective and design needs-based carbon farming solutions (practices and technologies) as well as strict policies to foster shifts towards a Climate-resilient Agriculture. The main objective of this project is to establish CARBONICA Excellence Hub by connecting the innovation ecosystems of Cyprus, Greece and North Macedonia, while enhancing their TRL as service providers, based on cutting-edge technologies (Earth Observation – EO; in situ data; digital agriculture etc.) in carbon farming. The main scope is to establish access to excellence to all relevant stakeholders in the QH of the WC, as well as strengthen regional innovation capacity guided by long-term joint R&I strategy in the carbon farming field.

CapaCITIES 2.0 is designed as a support action for national and regional authorities to advance their governance structures for providing dedicated support for cities to achieve the EU Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission (EU Cities Mission) - answering to the Call HORIZON-MISS-2024-CIT-02-01. As a central initiative to foster and strengthen national narratives for the EU Cities Mission, it will coordinate actions across climate-neutral initiatives for cities in Europe, align and speed up efforts towards the goals of the Mission. CapaCITIES 2.0 will further shape a European environment conducive to urban climate neutrality transitions for national, regional and local authorities. It will initiate and strengthen national change processes to establish and mature national networks and platforms as well as multi-level governance in the entire EU, building on the experience of the CapaCITIES that already started setting-up national platforms in 15 EU countries. It provides dedicated support for public authorities to put enabling conditions and measures for cities in place to achieve the EU Cities Mission. Thereby, it contributes to reach (1) Increased preparedness and capacity of national, regional and local authorities in EU Member States and countries associated to Horizon Europe to engage in cities’ transition towards climate neutrality; (2) Improved ability to effectively address country-specific challenges and barriers for cities to achieve climate neutrality related to current regulatory frameworks, funding and financing, and governance structures and promotion of best-practices through transnational exchanges and sharing of experience and (3) Enhanced synergies with R&I national/international communities, relevant initiatives, and partnerships such as the ‘Driving Urban Transitions to a Sustainable Future’ Horizon Europe Partnership and the NetZeroCities – the EU Mission Platform(NZC) for the implementation of the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission.

PERIVALLON aims to provide an improved and comprehensive intelligence picture of organised environmental crime and develop effective and efficient tools and solutions for detecting and preventing such types of criminal activities and for assessing their environmental impact based on geospatial intelligence, remote sensing, scanning, online monitoring, analysis, correlation, risk assessment, and predictive analytics technologies, by leveraging the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fields of computer vision and multimodal analytics. As a result, enhanced investigation processes and methodologies will be derived through the capabilities provided by the developed tools and solutions, and the insights obtained though the proposed Environmental Crime Observatory. The capacity of end users (including Police Authorities and Border Guards) will also be improved and will enable them to tackle such criminal activities in an effective manner based on advanced tools and solutions and also on the innovative training curricula developed using physical and/or digital twins of relevant environmental crime scenarios. Moreover, improved international cooperation will be facilitated through improved data sharing enabled by blockchain technologies, while improved regulation shaping and tuning will be supported through relevant policy recommendations. PERIVALLON will be validated in field tests and demonstrations in four operational use cases. Extensive training, hands-on experience, joint exercises, and training material will boost the uptake of PERIVALLON tools and technologies. With a Consortium 5 Police and Border Guard Authorities, 3 authorities related to environmental protection, 6 Research/Academic institutions, 8 industry partners (including seven SMEs), one EU Agency, and one Foundation, PERIVALLON delivers a strong representation of the challenges, requirements and tools to meet its objectives.