Re-imagining Environments for Connection and Engagement: Testing Actions for Social Prescribing in Natural Spaces (RECETAS) will address loneliness, a modifiable health condition that is known to shorten one´s lifespan and may be as dangerous to one’s health as smoking or obesity. In Europe alone, and before COVID-19 pandemic, over 75 million European adults reported meeting with family and friends at most once per month and 30 million European adults frequently felt lonely. Loneliness knows no geographic, economic, cultural, and social boundaries and affects all age groups. For urban dwellers, nearby nature, with social structures, can improve health and mental well-being and reduce loneliness. Even under the extraordinary circumstances of COVID-19, people need time in nature for its healing benefits and its role in allowing people to interact in nature. Investments in nature-based solutions (NBS) and green infrastructure (GI) that address rapid urbanization and its adverse consequences on environmental systems in our cities, can be harnessed for health and well-being even in times of health emergencies. RECETAS explores loneliness through a transdisciplinary lens, integrating social, behavioral, health, and natural sciences, and is grounded in participatory principles. It will use randomized controlled trials (RCT) and other epidemiologic, anthropological and health economic methods to test socially- and culturally-innovative nature-based social prescribing (NBSP) in six cities in Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The approach aims to improve upon real-world policy and practice to reduce loneliness by connecting people experiencing loneliness with helping professionals and extensive investments in NBS and GI, while alleviating pressures on stressed health care systems. If successful, it will systematically reduce loneliness, promote and sustain vibrant, socially-connected communities, and reduce health inequalities by connecting to nature in meaningful ways. “RECETAS” is part of the European Cluster on Urban Health.

Currently, most decisions in the academic settings in Latin American HEIs are based on preconceptions or feelings. If data is used, it is in the form of database reports that only provide the most basic level of information. Due to the last decade modernization of academic systems in most Latin American HEIs, there is a large amount of data being produced every day, but this data is usually ignored.This project aims to build local capacity in Latin American HEIs to create, adapt, implement and adopt Learning Analytics tools to improve academic decision making processes. These tools will facilitate the process and analysis of large amount of data produced by the different educational process that occur inside Latin American HEIs (registration, academic performance, online systems usage, etc.). Stakeholders will use the output of these tools to inform and support their decisions. These evidence-based decision making process improves the performance and quality of the education inside the HEI.To be able to develop the local capacity to create, adapt and use Learning Analytics tools in Latin America, first a framework that describe the methodological, technical, institutional, ethical and communal aspects of the deployment of Learning Analytics in the context of Latin American HEIs should be developed by the project. Moreover, the project will adapt two existing tools created originally in the context of Europe to the Latin American context. One will be directed to academic administrators and the other, to professors and counselors. Both of these tools will be piloted to test their efficacy.The final result of the project will be the compilation of the LALA Handbook, a guide containing the LALA Methodology, the Infrastructure recommendation and the adoption experiences and best-practices gained during the pilot. This handbook will be the guiding resources to any other Latin American HEI interested in adopting Learning Analytics to modernize their operations.

Cervical cancer is the 4th most common cancer in women worlThe ELEVATE project sets a multidisciplinary team comprising manufactures and experts from Europe and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, to improve the global adequacy and coverage of cervical cancer screening, particularly to specific populations of women that by not being regularly screened (hard-to-reach populations) are at higher-risk to develop cervical cancer. Although Cervical cancer is still the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide, with up to 85% of the burden occurring in developing countries, preventive vaccination against human papillomavirus and early detection of precancer in screening programs has shown to be successful in reducing cancer incidence and mortality.1–3 However, different challenges hamper a global implementation of such programs and are in the base of women’s non-attendance to screening. This highlights the lack of reflection of ethnic, cultural and resource differences from different populations in current cervical cancer screening. In ELEVATE it is proposed to conduct social science investigations to identify hard-to-reach women in Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador and Portugal, to address their barriers to screening and to design strategies to make primary screening more accessible to them, and therefore, contribute to reduce the global burden of cervical cancer. This will be complemented with fundamental and technological research to develop an efficient and marketable test for the combined genomic and proteomic detection of high-risk HPV infections in Belgium and Ecuador. The test will be made portable, low-cost, compatible with self-sampling, point-of-care and generate rapid and easy-to-understand results, without relying on electrical outlets or trained health personnel. Integrant part of the proposal is also to infer and disseminate the societal, economic implications of the developed strategies using a hard-to-reach community-based participatory research.

ILUCIDARE is a three and a half year project to promote and leverage heritage-led innovation and international relations through the creation and activation of an international community of heritage practitioners in Europe and beyond, while strongly contributing to the overall objectives of the communication Towards an EU strategy for international cultural relations (JOIN/2016/029) and EU international cooperation in research and innovation (COM(2012)497). ILUCIDARE refers to both “elucidare”, aiming to provide a common definition of CH-led innovation and international relations, and “lucidare”, aiming to raise awareness, provide assistance, leverage and upscale CH-led innovation and international relations on a global scale. ILUCIDARE opts to tie its activities to strong established networks rather than just creating a new isolated project with little or no impact. The project will enable the exchanges of best practices, knowledge transfer, skills development and cross-fertilisation within its global network through an extensive use of digital engagement strategies and tools as well as participatory activities including focus groups and co-creation ateliers, 3 high-level international conferences – aka Playgrounds, 5 international competitions (including 4 ILUCIDARE special EU Prizes for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra awards), online training by means of a Youtube Learning Channel with community manager, 2 academic training courses, and onsite capacity buildings in 11 capacity buildings in 10 countries in Europe, the Western Balkans, South America, Middle East and Africa. The strong international component of ILUCIDARE activities will allow to foster intercultural dialogue and effectively improve EU external relations through cultural heritage diplomacy. Based on continuous exchanges facilitated by a special appointed Community Manager, ILUCIDARE will act as an hub for heritage-led innovative solutions and will support spill-overs and sustainable development collaborations to better preserve and promote heritage, especially where it is at risk.

INNOQUA will accelerate the path to market of a modular set of innovative, patent protected, award winning and scalable fully ecological sanitation solutions that address wide market needs in rural communities, for agricultural industries, for sustainable home-builders or collective housing owners and for developing countries worldwide. The modular system is based on the purification capacity of biological organisms (worms, zooplankton and microorganism) and sorption materials bringing ecological, safe and affordable sanitation capacity where it is needed most while fully addressing the thematic and cross cutting priorities of the EIP on Water. We will perform demonstration scale deployment and resulting exploitation of the system to include commercial development, technology integration, eco-design, controlled environment pilots (in NUI Galway facilities in Ireland and UDG facilities in Spain), real use demo sites and market uptake preparation in several EU and non-EU countries (France, Italy, Ireland, Romania, UK, Ecuador, Peru, India and Tanzania), and further preparation for post project uptake. Such an integrated solution is innovative and has not been employed in the past. This integrated but modular solution for the final reuse of wastewater is particularly attractive for small to medium remote water stressed European communities with high water demand for either agriculture and/or the conservation of natural freshwater ecosystems. The system is aimed at being a sustainable solution for ‘zero’ wastewater production with the complete reuse of wastewater. The system is ideal for small to medium scale situations where an integrated solution for the treatment of wastewater is required to reduce the waste directed to surface freshwaters for the attainment of good quality water, as stated by the Water Framework Directive. The robust but efficient technologies are also ideal for deployment in markets where resources are limited and skilled staff unavailable.