The SOTERIA project aims to advance innovative insurance solutions for climate change adaptation in different European regions and communities. To do so, SOTERIA will work through three main tracks forming the core of our approach: i) documenting best practice in relation to data, new insurance and robust enabling frameworks; ii) testing of some of these solutions; and iii) the creation of communities of practice for regions and insurance as legacy. We aim to help reducing the protection gap by documenting best practice and the testing of insurance products and services that reward proactive prevention measures while seeking to increase coverage through co-designed solutions. We will also consider the enabling framework that analyses the role of public sector modernisation and how to develop affordable insurance schemes that leave no one behind, through our Communities of Practice engaged in Climate Resilience society-insurance dialogues. SOTERIA will take these solutions from the levels of research to demonstration and testing with some at the level of pre-commercial procurement in at least three cases thanks to a network of three pilots and 5 satellites that span different geographical areas (and needs). The project legacy a set of best practice materials as well as a Community of Practice to support other regions interested to design and/or adopt innovative insurance solutions. SOTERIA will contribute to the wider goal of the Mission Adaptation to increase Europe’s resilience and preparedness to face unavoidable consequences of climate change by filling the gaps on insurance coverage for climate adaptation.

MARCO-BOLO (MBO) aims to structure and strengthen European coastal and marine biodiversity observation capabilities, linking them to global efforts to understand and restore ocean health, hence ensuring that outputs respond to explicit stakeholder needs from policy, planning and industry. To this end MBO will establish and engage with a Community of Practice (CoP) to determine end-user needs with the aim of optimising marine data flows, knowledge uptake, and improving governance based on biodiversity observations. By exploiting synergies with concurrent projects MBO will develop and demonstrate new autonomous technology for biodiversity mapping and monitoring, and data streams from remote sensing, eDNA, robotics, optical and acoustic observations. Protocols for eDNA-based biodiversity observations are established and validated across applications, taxa and ecosystems. The sequence of the analytical and technical processes for the different use cases will be incorporated into operational Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) and Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and included into online reusable workflows, contributing to the free and open access of EU and global biodiversity information facilities, and to support major EU biodiversity directives and global initiatives. The project partnership will leverage its international activities (MBON, GOOS, OBIS) and participation in UN Ocean Decade Programmes (Marine Life 2030, OBON, ODIS, Ocean Practices for the Decade) to align the MBO work programme to global CoP, ensuring European participation and leadership in global biodiversity monitoring and global science. MBO results will be designed to build upon existing capability and infrastructures, and to be relevant to existing frameworks so that outputs can be easily integrated into national, regional (EU and adjacent sea basins), and global observation systems, with no delay ensuring the reusability of the investments Europe is already making in data generation.

Wild pollinators are a key part of European biodiversity and provide a wide range of benefits to crops, wild plants, and human wellbeing. In Europe and globally, wild pollinators are facing multiple threats, however, the full extent of declines, their complex causes, and the most effective ways to respond to them are not well understood. Safeguard brings together world-leading researchers, NGOs, industry and policy experts to substantially contribute to Europe’s capacity to reverse the losses of wild pollinators. Safeguard will significantly expand current assessments of the status and trends of European wild pollinators including bees, butterflies, flies and other pollinating insects. We will use state-of-the-art models to predict the impacts of pressures on pollinators, paying particular attention to emerging threats, multiple and interacting drivers, long-term and cumulative effects, and multiple spatial scales. Safeguard will establish empirical research for a systematic multi-scale assessment of multiple pressures on pollinators and the context-dependent effectiveness of interventions. Working with our stakeholders, we will provide an improved understanding of the diverse values of European pollinators, and develop and test new approaches using multiple interventions to benefit pollinators, from field to landscape scales across agricultural, natural, and urban systems. We will co-develop with stakeholders an integrated assessment framework and tools that incorporate multiple types of evidence to address pollinator declines and direct mitigation strategies at the local, national, and EU levels. Safeguard will use the significant advance in knowledge to inform national, European, and global policies and decision-making. Finally, Safeguard will increase awareness of wild pollinators and their societal values with the public, policy makers, scientists, industry, and NGOs, to mobilise concerted multiple actions towards reversing pollinator declines across Europe.

The ENIGMA network will train a new generation of young researchers in the development of innovative sensors, field survey techniques and inverse modelling approaches. This will enhance our ability to understand and monitor dynamic subsurface processes that are key to the protection and sustainable use of water resources. ENIGMA focuses mainly on critical zone observation, but the anticipated technological developments and scientific findings will also contribute to monitor and model the environmental footprint of an increasing range of subsurface activities, including large-scale water abstraction and storage, enhanced geothermal systems and subsurface waste and carbon storage. While many subsurface structure imaging methods are now mature and broadly used in research and practice, our ability to resolve and monitor subsurface fluxes and processes, including solute transport, heat transfer and biochemical reactions, is much more limited. The shift from classical structure characterization to dynamic process imaging, driven by ENIGMA, will require the development of multi-scale hydrogeophysical methods with adequate sensitivity, spatial and temporal resolution, and novel inverse modelling concepts. For this, ENIGMA will gather (i) world-leading academic teams and emerging companies that develop innovative sensors and hydrogeophysical inversion methods, (ii) experts in subsurface process upscaling and modelling, and (iii) highly instrumented field infrastructures for in-situ experimentation and validation. ENIGMA will thus create a creative and entrepreneurial environment for trainees to develop integrated approaches to water management with interdisciplinary field-sensing methods and novel modelling techniques. ENIGMA will foster EU and international cooperation in the water area by creating new links between hydrogeological observatories, academic research groups, innovative industries and water managers for high-level scientific and professional training.