To restore and protect ocean ecosystems within a sustainable blue economy, in line with the objectives of the Mission ‘Restore Our Ocean and Waters by 2030’, we urgently need new business models for regenerative aquaculture, informed by best scientific evidence on environmental impacts and developed in partnership with societal stakeholders. To encourage adoption, such practices must be technically, operationally, and economically viable for ocean farmers, with clear benefits to ecosystem services, community resilience, market potential and job creation. C-FAARER will deliver a roadmap and guidance, co-designed with stakeholders, to support ocean farmers in the Atlantic and Arctic Sea basin to develop community-driven business models for regenerative ocean farming and policymakers to take enabling actions. C-FAARER builds on prior EU projects, reviewing evidence on socio-economic and environmental impacts and successful community business models to establish a robust case for adoption. Working with ocean farmers and coastal communities at sites in Norway and Ireland, we will analyse technical, operational, economic, environmental, and social needs and create guidance on developing site-specific community-led business plans. We will co-design feasibility reports and evidence-based business plans with members of the Norwegian Seaweed Association cluster of 80+ ocean farmers, replicate lessons via a new Irish Seaweed Association and ensure long-term sustainability through a new Community of Practice on the established Connecting Nature Enterprise Platform. Policy recommendations will highlight barriers, supports and investments needed from local, national and EU authorities to strengthen and scale regenerative community-led aquaculture in the Atlantic and Arctic Sea basin. Clustering and engagement with Ocean Mission projects and partner networks will identify opportunities to embed community-led business models for regenerative aquaculture in future Mission actions.

Edulia responds to the urgent need of EU society to find new ways to tackle the escalating issue of obesity, through promoting healthier eating from childhood. Based on the relations of sensory perception, pleasure, food choice and food behaviour, the project will look for new approaches to drive children to like and actively choose healthy foods, developing healthier habits. Edulia is a multi-disciplinary and inter-sectorial European Training and Research Network with a global reach. Our network will train a new generation of innovative and adaptable researchers, with highly specialised skills across complementary fields studying children’s food choice, while exposing them to cross-sector experiences, in order to build strong career development paths. The training program includes multidisciplinary scientific training within natural and social sciences, secondments in academic and non-academic organisations, and courses in transferable skills, promoting science communication and outreach. The overall aim of the research programme is to better understand how multiple factors act as barriers for children’s healthy eating and how to tackle them, bringing together leading scientists in the Food Choice arena in a collaborative network that will transcend the limits of this project and strengthen European research. Edulia will go further than the classical approach of “teaching children what is healthy”, by exploring approaches such as positive marketing, nudging strategies, focusing on peer and family social interactions, studying sensory and non-sensory parameters that influence what is eaten (food choice) and how much is eaten (intake), and exploiting the positive food sensory characteristics which can drive healthy eating through enhancing pleasure. We will ultimately propose innovative approaches to support children’s healthier eating, providing a strong knowledge base and clear guidance for children, the general public, the food industry and EU policy makers.

Citizens’ decisions are central to living within the limits of our planet. Purchasing choices can drive change at retail and raw commodity levels but the complexity of fish and seafood food chains, health benefits and risks, and climate impacts need to be simplified and made more accessible and readily comparable. Currently, there are no standardised ways to inform citizens about the various health issues, nor are there guidelines or harmonised indicators for sustainable European fish and seafood products. VeriFish will offer a framework of verifiable sustainability indicators for communications about sustainability based on FAIR data from EU- and global aquafoods repositories, brought together through the extraordinary collaboration of European-wide actors like NOFIMA, EUROFIR and POSEIDON. Leveraging on this indicator, VeriFish will design, develop, and disseminate a number of media products to help citizens, seafood consumers and retailers, associations and policy makers make informed consumption choices. NOFIMA domain experts will work with renowned scientific communicators from EuroFISH and experienced community builder Trust-IT publish a good practice recommendation framework on neutral indicators to communicate sustainability along different consumer segments, aquafood retailers, seafood and aquaculture producers and associations, as well as guidelines for their use in retail and HoReCa (hotels, restaurants, catering). A prototype web application will digest indicators into an accessible (easy to use) comprehensive media product for user communities, including citizens, summarising nutrition, sustainability, and biodiversity aspects. The framework will be open access, and will be tested via a series of related end-user engagement campaigns targeting younger generations via flashcard games for kids, calendars and maps of seasonal fish for retailers and consumers, and sustainable food influencers & chefs on social media.

ArcticKnows will empower Coastal, Local and Indigenous Communities (CLICs) in the Arctic to mobilise their indigenous and local knowledges (including traditional ecological knowledge) and enhance their agency to act towards co-creating regenerative economies and livelihoods in a just, inclusive, and gender-sensitive way. The project convenes CLICs, researchers and other local stakeholders (industry, businesses, civil society, policymakers) in a just and decolonial knowledge co-creation process, to co-design and co-deploy pioneering principles, methodologies, guidelines, frameworks and indicators for regenerative economies and livelihoods, as well as attractive platforms for community engagement and participation. ArcticKnows tackles some of the key challenges including a) climate change and climate related vulnerabilities; b) extractive economic models and mindsets; c) lack of recognition and/or—depending on the context—appropriation of local and indigenous knowledges; and d) lack of CLICs, women, and youth engagement in decision-making. It employs just, decolonial and inclusive knowledge co-creation and multi-actor collaborative and transdisciplinary approaches, for innovating and transforming towards regenerative and climate-wise economy, while co-designing platforms for meaningful community engagement that empowers and strengthen CLICs’, women, youth and other marginalized groups to participate in policy making. In ArcticKnows we cocreate, demonstrate and evaluate examples of regenerative local economies in four Pilots, in Greenland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, focusing on close-to-nature tourism, small-scale climate-resilient agriculture and climate-resilient fisheries, all of which represent environments of multispecies encounters. ArcticKnows advances and activates multispecies coexistence and justice. Finally, it promotes mindful sharing and scaling up best practices, while ensuring intellectual and cultural autonomy of local and indigenous knowledge holders.

VALORISH is a 42-month action that aims to develop a computationally-assisted methodology for the design and implementation of a biorefinery with a cascade approach to valorise waste and by-products from the fishing industry at TRL 5. The target portfolio of products will be fish oil, fish protein hydrolysates, bacteriocins, pigments, vitamins, collagen and calcium-rich powder, targeting food products, additives, supplements and nutraceuticals. The cascade conversion processes will vary with the feedstock heterogeneity, comprising pre-treatment, oil green extraction, proteolytic fermentation (protein hydrolysis), fermentation with hydrolysates as substrate, and a portfolio of downstream processes. The proteolytic fermentation will be guided by computational biology, using models to search new candidate enzyme-producing bacteria. The fish protein hydrolysates obtained in the fermentation will be used, first, as food supplement due to their bioactive properties, and second, as substrate for supporting a second fermentation, to obtain high-value bioproducts, namely bacteriocins and astaxanthin, as food additives, and vitamin B12, as food supplement. Novel genome-scale metabolic models will be used to link substrate composition to the desired bioproducts via inspection of metabolic pathways and selecting optimal microorganisms. In a zero-waste aim, the fermentation side-streams will be valorised (bones by extraction and calcination, and residual biomass by anaerobic digestion). All the bioproducts will be analysed for chemical, nutritional, bioactive and safety properties to comply with EU regulation, and will be included in food/nutraceutical formulations and validated by end users. A mathematical model will be developed to simulate the biorefinery and to support the satisfactory scale-up of the core processes as well as the assessment methodologies (technoeconomic, environmental, standardisation). Social impact and acceptance of the products will be also assessed.