Cities and regions in Europe (EU) and Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC) face shared and urgent global-local challenges to integrate practical actions with strategies to achieve greater inclusion, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental quality. Many cities share problems of landscape fragmentation caused by rapid growth, urban sprawl and economic restructuring. Poorly planned urbanisation leaves a legacy of cities lacking the green areas needed for ecosystems to provide the services essential to human life. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have the potential to help reverse these trends, and our combined EU-CELAC palette of socio-cultural, ecological and governance contexts represents a huge opportunity to move forward - faster, together. CONEXUS will co-produce, structure and promote access to the shared, contextualised knowledge needed to support cities and communities to co-create NBS, and to restore urban ecosystems, to help drive the required step-change in urban policy and practice in EU and CELAC countries. It adopts a planetary health perspective: healthy landscapes and ecosystems are vital to support human life, and humanity must restore, create and care for these landscapes and ecosystems in a reciprocal, ongoing and iterative relationship. This transdisciplinary project uses nature-based thinking (NBT) to bring together community, private, public and research partners to meet this challenge, and experiments with novel co-production methods to deliver NBS innovations in ‘Life-Lab’ pilots. The project’s core concept is to co-create context-appropriate NBS for ecosystems restoration and sustainable urbanisation in CELAC and EU cities, using a place-based approach (place-making, place-keeping and place-prescribing), solving problems together with citizens. The CONEXUS cities are: in CELAC - São Paulo, Bogotá, Santiago and Buenos Aires; and in the EU - Lisbon, Barcelona and Turin.

ROSEWOOD4.0 builds on the well-established ROSEWOOD network of Regional Hubs connecting multiple actors along the forest value chain to reinforce the sustainability of wood mobilisation in Europe. The new action will especially reinforce and enlarge the links with Eastern Europe by creating a new Eastern Hub including new countries (Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine). Secondly, the action puts special emphasis on digitalisation (forestry industry 4.0) and digital tools (social media, platforms, e-learning) for training and coaching, enabling practitioners to share know-how with much wider impact. The focus on ICT addresses the two main challenges in wood mobilisation: 1) better access to resources through defragmentation of forest owners and 2) increased volume to the market and higher transparency. The project’s extensive dissemination of best practices, technological and non-technological innovations and research results feeds directly into national and regional Agriculture Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) in forestry and builds an efficient interface with the EIP-AGRI and the EIP Raw Materials, supported by the European networks EFI and InnovaWood. The multi-actor action closes knowledge gaps, connects and transfers tangible knowledge and best practice between forestry practitioners across the whole Europe. In an open innovation environment, the coordination of Regional Hubs facilitates also new opportunities for exploitation of near to market innovations and fosters business partnerships between stakeholders, aligned with local and regional development plans, to complement existing or initiate new Operational Groups within the EIP-AGRI. ROSEWOOD4.0 will contribute to enhanced competitiveness of the forest industry and to vital development in rural areas within the European Bioeconomy by responding to the imminent need for broader sharing of ICT-driven solutions in forestry.

Carbon smart forestry under climate change (CARE4C) combines high level expertise and state of the art research in the context of carbon management in forests with advanced career building qualification by teaching, training and involving ESR's . CARE4C aims at substantially expanding knowledge about carbon sink by forest growth and carbon source by forest operations in order to enable carbon smart forestry under climate change. We trace the knowledge from understanding to modelling and application, and follow a clear dissemination strategy by training and teaching, publications in scientific journals and by involving forest related stakeholders and the public. The project builds upon a consortium that was successfully established within the Marie Curie IRSES project Climate-Fit Forests. Here, the consortium is enlarged by complementary academic and non-academic partners, and the exploratory focus is extended. The study area encompasses a broad range of climatic zones from Mediterranean to sub-boreal areas providing highly different growing conditions and landscapes differently affected by climate change. By this multilevel and multidisciplinary approach we overcome the restrictions concerning the transferability of locally and case study focused results. We plan a rather high number of secondments in order to efficiently extend the interdisciplinary network and dissemination. The project connects countries where both, integrative and segregative approaches, are prevailing in forest management. The forest types of interest include pure and mixed stands as well as complex structured close to nature forests. We track climate induced impacts on carbon sequestration on cell, organ, and tree level up to stand and landscape level. For a broad spectrum of forest types and management approaches we measure and compile information about carbon sink and source, model the carbon balance, take into account economics and derive carbon smart forest management options under climate