Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

Agriculture soils are being heavily affected by climate change and are highly vulnerable to degradation and desertification, particularly in the Mediterranean and southern regions of the EU. If climate change is not mitigated, yields of crops like wheat, maize and sugar beet could decrease in southern EU by up to 50 % by 2050. Although agriculture has been signalled as a significant contributor to GHG emissions (13% of EU total emissions), it is also one of the sectors with the biggest potential to adapt to and mitigate climate change. In this sense, Carbon Farming appears as a promising solution for soils’ health and for the sustainability of EU agriculture. LILAS4SOILS will put in place 5 Living Labs (LLs) in 6 countries to co-create the adoption of Carbon Farming solutions within farmers, agri-food businesses, researchers and local authorities, and implement Carbon Farming Practices -CFPs- (peatland management, agroforestry, livestock and manure management, and nutrient management, maintaining soil organic carbon) in 85-100 demo-sites. CFPs impact on soil carbon sequestration and environmental co-benefits will be assessed through the adoption of homogeneous Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) technologies. The 5-year project involves 24 expert partners, +25 stakeholders will part of each LL for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange (20 co-creation workshops to be held) and +71 farmers will be engaged in CFPs implementation, ensuring the multi-actor approach. 10 training workshops (supported by 21 materials), 10 policy workshops (supported by 2 sets of recommendations per LL), 8 cross-fertilisation and synergies workshops and 2 replication workshops within other regions in EU are envisaged as part of the project's focus on knowledge transfer. Through directed Open Calls, LILAS4SOILS will encourage the participation of 35-50 additional farmers and support the testing of 15 MRV innovative technologies that overcome the limitations of the conventional ones.

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.

CyLH2Valley aims to develop and demonstrate a large-scale Hydrogen Valley in Castilla y León region, encompassing mobility, industry and energy applications. The project will guarantee at least two years of full operation aiming to achieve a full integration and operation during the period 2028-2029. The focus will be on operating the CyL Hydrogen Valley to demonstrate its financial viability, how all the different applications (9 pilots) fit together in an integrated system approach, and the versatility of hydrogen, as an energy vector, in enabling sector coupling. The financial viability of the CyL Hydrogen Valley will pave the way for the upscaling of the valley and the creation of a clean hydrogen economy in the CyL region by 2035, aligning the interests of the most relevant stakeholders from the hydrogen value chain. This contributes to the achievement of the EU hydrogen strategy and REPowerEU plan, while advancing towards the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

SILVANUS envisages to deliver an environmentally sustainable and climate resilient forest management platform through innovative capabilities to prevent and combat against the ignition and spread of forest fires. The platform will cater to the demands of efficient resource utilisation and provide protection against threats of wildfires encountered globally. The project will establish synergies between (i) environmental; (ii) technology and (iii) social science experts for enhancing the ability of regional and national authorities to monitor forest resources, evaluate biodiversity, generate more accurate fire risk indicators and promote safety regulations among citizens through awareness campaigns. The novelty of SILVANUS lies in the development and integration of advanced semantic technologies to systematically formalise the knowledge of forest administration and resource utilisation. Additionally, the platform will integrate a big-data processing framework capable of analysing heterogeneous data sources including earth observation resources, climate models and weather data, continuous on-board computation of multi-spectral video streams. Also, the project integrates a series of sensor and actuator technologies using innovative wireless communication infrastructure through the coordination of aerial vehicles and ground robots. The technological platform will be complemented with the integration of resilience models, and the results of environmental and ecological studies carried out for the assessment of fire risk indicators based on continuous surveys of forest regions. The surveys are designed to take into consideration the expertise and experience of frontline fire fighter organisations who collectively provide support for 47,504x104 sq. meters of forest area within Europe and across international communities. The project innovation will be validated through 11 pilot demonstrations across Europe and internationally using a two sprint cycle.