Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.

The main objective of EO4AGRI is to catalyze the evolution of the European capacity for improving operational agriculture monitoring from local to global levels based on information derived from Copernicus satellite observation data and through exploitation of associated geospatial and socio-economic information services. EO4AGRI assists the implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with special attention to the CAP2020 reform, to requirements of Paying Agencies, and for the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) processes. EO4AGRI works with farmers, farmer associations and agro-food industry on specifications of data-driven farming services with focus on increasing the utilization of EC investments into Copernicus Data and Information Services (DIAS). EO4AGRI addresses global food security challenges coordinated within the G20 Global Agricultural Monitoring initiative (GEOGLAM) capitalizing on Copernicus Open Data as input to the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEW-NET). EO4AGRI assesses information about land-use and agricultural service needs and offers to financial investors and insurances and the potential added value of fueling those services with Copernicus information. The EO4AGRI team consists of 11 organizations, complementary in their roles and expertise, covering a good part of the value-chain with a significant relevant networking capital as documented in numerous project affiliations and the formal support declarations collected for EO4AGRI. All partners show large records of activities either in Copernicus RTD, governmental functions, or downstream service operations. The Coordinator of EO4AGRI is a major industrial player with proven capacities to lead H2020 projects. The EO4AGRI project methodology is a combination of community building; service gap analysis; technology watch; strategic research agenda design and policy recommendations; dissemination (incl. organization of hackathons).

The SPARROW platform represents a pioneering solution for enhancing societal resilience and crisis management in the face of digital breakdowns. Employing a modular architecture encompassing data integration, simulation modeling, and a collaborative platform, SPARROW orchestrates large datasets and expert insights to create a dynamic digital twin of a city. This digital twin, visualized in 3D, becomes a robust testing ground for assessing vulnerabilities and preparing for diverse crisis scenarios. Through a participatory approach involving citizens, local authorities, and first responders, the platform fosters communication during breakdowns and bolsters preparedness against digital threats. SPARROW's innovative tools, including the Emergency Communication Mobile App (ECOMAPP), City Digital Twin (CITWIN), and the Dynamic Critical Asset Management Recommendation Engine (DYCAMARE), are co-designed with stakeholders to ensure user-friendly, effective, and ethically sound functionalities. The platform's impact extends across various sectors, from critical infrastructure managers optimizing maintenance to emergency responders utilizing a mobile 5G network (EMER-5G) for prioritized communication (ECOPRIM). In alignment with EU policies, SPARROW aims to enhance crisis communication, bridge gaps in digital breakdown preparedness, and contribute to a secure and resilient European way of life.

PLUS Change brings together 23 institutions from across Europe including 5 Universities, 5 research institutes, 3 stakeholder network organisations, 1 performing arts collective, and 9 practice partners representing regional planning and land management authorities and organisations. The objectives directly address the call with an aim to create land use strategies and decision-making processes that meet climate, biodiversity and human well-being objectives of sustainability, and to develop interventions that leverage political, economic, societal, material and cultural contexts to achieve these strategies, by involving actors at multiple decision-making levels (individual, land management, planning, policy). Activities include land use modelling (including historical and future trajectories of change), systems mapping, causal loop diagrams, performing arts approaches, randomized controlled trials of behaviour change, sociological surveys, and policy and governance reviews. All activities brought together in an integrated research design that draws on their different contributions to a holistic approach to understand multi-scale land use systems across a diversity of socioeconomic and biogeographical contexts, and create usable tools for land managers, users, planners and policy makers. The project is anchored in, and integrated through, 11 location-based cases for co-creation, and in a high-level multiplier cluster to identify challenges and impacts at EU and Global levels. Outputs include recommendations of co-designed and tested interventions to unlock behavioural, structural and procedural changes to achieve identified land use strategies; and a toolkit to support land use planners in enacting these interventions, including knowledge training, a planning dashboard and simulation tools, and methods for engaging citizens and land managers in behaviour change.

PoliVisu is a Research and Innovation project designed to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using big data. The aim is to enhance an open set of digital tools to leverage data to help public sector decision-making become more democratic by (a) experimenting with different policy options through impact visualisation and (b) using the resulting visualisations to engage and harness the collective intelligence of policy stakeholders for collaborative solution development. Working with three cities to address societal problems linked to smart mobility and urban planning, the intention is to enable public administrations to respond to urban challenges by enriching the policy making process with opportunities for policy experimentation at three different steps of the policy cycle (policy design, policy implementation, and policy evaluation). Experimentation of policy options will enable the cities to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking to develop transformative solutions.