Being one of the main actions of the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the European Biodiversity Partnership (Biodiversa+) will coordinate research programmes between EU and its Member States and Associated Countries, mobilising environmental authorities as key partners for implementing biodiversity research and innovation, along with ministries of research, funding organisations, and environmental protection agencies (75 organisations from 37 countries). Biodiversa+ has five overarching objectives: (1) improve monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem services across Europe (status and trends); (2) generate actionable knowledge to tackle the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss; (3) expand and improve the evidence base, and accelerate the development and wide deployment of NbS to meet societal challenges across Europe; (4) make the business case for the conservation and restoration of biodiversity; and (5) ensure efficient science-based support for biodiversity policy making in Europe. Biodiversa+ will meet these objectives by (i) setting up a pan-European network of harmonized monitoring schemes, building on existing national/regional monitoring schemes, creating capacity for setting up new schemes, and feeding into the EC Knowledge Center for Biodiversity; (ii) coordinating research programmes between the EU and its Member States and associated countries, thereby ensuring the long-term pan-European research agenda is co-created and implemented; (iii) contributing science-based methodologies to account for and possibly value ecosystem services and the natural capital, and to assess the dependency and impact of businesses on biodiversity and (iv) better linking of R&I programmes to the policy arena, providing greater input to policy making and improving the assessment of policy efficiency. Doing so, Biodiversa+ will help ensure that, by 2030, nature in Europe is back on a path of recovery, and by 2050 people are living in harmony with Nature.

The STI cooperation between the EU and South Africa as originally framed by the South Africa-EU Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement and as constantly steered by the JSTCC requires a support mechanism which can translate and facilitate policy decisions, and provide intelligence and information services to various actors and stakeholders. In previous years the ESASTAP project series (ESASTAP, ESASTAP-2 and ESASTAP+) has successfully provided this support to the bilateral dialogue. The proposed ESASTAP 2020 project is a coordination and support action that aims at advancing further the EU-SA bilateral STI cooperation, building on the work and results of three preceding actions and responding to the needs and recommendations at the policy dialogue level, in particular to the mandate of the JSTCC and to the adopted Roadmap for cooperation between South Africa and the European Union. The project aims to provide efficient services on three levels (priority areas): a. R&I Cooperation in areas of common interests (Horizon 2020 and others). b. Policy Dialogue between EU and SA and by increasing the knowledge of the EU’s external environment. c. Provision of a Cooperation platform and tools to alleviate obstacles. These priority areas translate into four major objectives through which the project is aiming to address the specific challenges of the call.

Water is central to all human activities, to all components of the EU Green Deal and to several UN SDGs. The Water4All Partnership aims at enabling water security for all on the long term through boosting systemic transformations and changes across the entire research – water innovation pipeline, fostering the matchmaking between problem owners and solution providers. It gathers more than 70 partners, R&I funders, environment ministries, local authorities, European, national and regional-scale networks, research performing organisations. It will collaborate with other relevant R&I initiatives. Water4All proposes a portfolio of multi-national, cross-sectoral activities, targeting a variety of actors, intending to generate the following outputs: - Strengthen the water R&I collaboration at European and international levels, across at least 31 countries, notably through Joint Transnational Calls - Coordinate and leverage the activities of the Water R&I community - Support and promote the demonstration and access to market of innovative solutions - Produce, share and better communicate water-related knowledge & data, from local to global scales - Enhance talent development of water R&I professionals - Foster capacity development and life-long training of water policy-makers, stakeholders and civil society - Design & implement approaches for participatory development of innovation Water4All will run its activities across 7 themes of its strategic agenda: water for circular economy; water for ecosystems and biodiversity; sustainable water management; water and health; water infrastructure; international cooperation; water governance. Water4All’s outputs will contribute to: - Deliver sound knowledge, tools and evidence basis on water for policy- & decision-making - Improve consideration of water impacts in all relevant policies - Enhance the field/market use of innovative solutions to water challenges - Increase citizens’ awareness and engagement for an inclusive water

The LEAP-RE programme aligns with and responds to the AU-EU high-level policies and specific objectives of the CCSE Roadmap. It seeks to create a long-term partnership of African and European stakeholders in a quadruple helix approach: government (programme owners and funding agencies), research and academia, private sector, and civil society. Impact will be sought by creating a framework, methodology, and cooperation model. The aim is to reduce fragmentation by aligning existing bilateral and multilateral frameworks. LEAP-RE establishes and jointly implements research, innovation, and capacity-building activities that respond to the Multi-Annual Roadmaps (MARs) developed in PRE-LEAP-RE. The programme opted for a large-scale, inclusive consortium of 96 partners from 34 countries and 2 international organisations, to ensure a broad thematic, geographical and stakeholder coverage, and to demonstrate the feasibility of the collaboration and build trust in view of a long-term partnership addressing the post-2025 period. LEAP-RE draws on the experience and partnership developed in PRE-LEAP-RE, which conceptualised and developed a framework for long-term, bi-regional cooperation in research, innovation, and capacity building in renewable energies. This partnership is further strengthened by previous collaboration between partners in other projects supporting the EU-Africa HLPD on STI, such as LEAP-Agri, ERAfrica, LEAP4FNSSA, RINEA, and CAAST-Net Plus. Furthermore, the proposal includes a number of R&I partners, 8 individual projects (formalised as Work Packages), which were chosen among expressions of interest received in late 2019.