REDRESS aims to provide a key contribution to the EU commitments towards restoring degraded ecosystems, especially in the deep sea. REDRESS will provide solutions to prioritize future restoration actions, extend deep-sea restoration to previously neglected habitat types, and demonstrate the feasibility, potential, and value for success of deep-sea ecosystem restoration. The project will focus on habitats that have great potential to contribute to carbon sequestration and climate mitigation but have been degraded by deep-sea fishing, especially trawling. Specifically, we will study vulnerable marine ecosystems, including sea pens and bamboo corals on soft sediments, coral gardens, cold-water coral reefs, sponge fields, and cold seeps. REDRESS will map degraded deep-sea habitats and identify habitat refugia to prioritize restoration efforts that will adapt to future scenarios of climate change. To adopt and adapt cutting-edge solutions for both restoration interventions and monitoring, REDRESS will make a significant technological investment and will benefit from a relevant ship time by in-kind contribution (136 days). REDRESS will offer nature-based solutions to public authorities and operators to advance ecosystem restoration in the deep sea. Building on the MERCES experience, REDRESS will go beyond the state of art, either developing new methodologies, using sophisticated technologies, defining success indicators, and expanding the target habitats also to cold seeps. The results will enable a significant advancement in the EU's marine restoration strategy. The project will also provide socioeconomic data, protocols, and tools to plan, and upscale restoration interventions in deep-sea habitats. REDRESS will provide novel insights into the advantages and limits of active vs passive deep-sea restoration, and related cost-benefit analysis in different deep-sea habitats supporting policies and decision makers in the future application of the Nature Restoration Law.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) are the leading cause of ill health and premature mortality. Although we know how to mitigate risk factors and prevent NCDs, we have failed to apply this knowledge, especially in disadvantaged populations. FA4LIFE aims to bridge this translational gap, and gain knowledge, resources and capacity to optimize implementation of multi-level, evidence-based tobacco and air pollution (AP) exposure prevention packages targeting adolescents in disadvantaged populations. To do so, FA4LIFE will work in five countries; Greece, the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Romania and Uganda. All face a high NCD burden, but their contexts differ significantly. These differences provide opportunity to gain implementation knowledge and resources that can be extrapolated to settings worldwide. All FA4LIFE activities are supported by dual capacity building: creating youth advocacy and professional leadership. In each setting, we will: 1. Perform situational analysis (incl. affordability) and establish sustainable stakeholder engagement teams 2. Use the Prevention palette method' to co-create a tailored, evidence-based FA4LIFE prevention package targeting tobacco and AP exposure in mid- to late adolescents, mindful of equity 3. Implement, evaluate and iteratively refine the FA4LIFE prevention package 4. Optimize sustainable implementation and equitable impact by building dual capacity, via youth advocacy digital initiatives, community leadership schools and Teach-the-Teacher programs. A robust and innovative dissemination, exploitation and communication plan, including the FA4LIFE Case For Action, the FA4LIFE implementation toolbox, and broad youth advocacy-informed social media strategy will promote upscaling and maximize global impact on NCD burden, especially in those adolescents most at risk or in need in disadvantaged populations.

Trust in science and technology as well as the utility and acceptability of their innovative outcomes is crucially dependent on the ethical qualities of the research. This is the reason why research projects are submitted to an ethical review. Although the existing ethics review infrastructure includes experienced members with expertise in traditional research, this is not the case for new technologies and transformative research that result in new human rights, such as digital rights. Thus, there is a clear need for ethics committees to evolve in order to cover this gap and to be able to support innovation while embedding new human rights. CHANGER aims to promote changes in research ethics reviews that strengthen the capacities of researchers to incorporate ethical judgements in the project design and implementation, and to support ethics committees to address new challenges posed by new technologies and new research practices. CHANGER will review current practices and ethics criteria, will identify and discuss new challenges emerging from new technologies and from new research practices, which are not sufficiently covered in the current review process, will provide innovative training to ethics review experts and researchers, and propose innovative approaches and tools to ethics review reform and new understandings to practice ethics by design, supported by guidelines and a policy roadmap. The CHANGER interdisciplinary consortium has extensive and long-standing experience-based expertise in research ethics reviews, integrity oversight and human rights and is capable of providing novel solutions to the needs in ethics reviews.

The rising concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, currently about 420 ppm, is already causing extensive damage globally. Thus, there ´s an urgent need to deploy CO2 removal (CDR) at very large scale to help to keep the temperature rise under 2C° (1.5C° would be better). Until recently, apart from academic research into a wide portfolio of approaches, little has been done to launch the necessary exponential growth of CDR over the next few decades. The current self-regulated market relies on an unsatisfactory patchwork of third party verification of the removals achieved at individual sites. The sector has been negatively influenced by a lack of regulation and high-quality standards. This has allowed low-quality carbon credits to enter the market, lowering credibility and prices to levels at which high-quality permanent removals cannot compete. The Member States need the EC to intervene to kick-start a transparent and properly regulated market for high-grade CDR delivery. The purpose of the C-SINK project is to deliver to the EC a complete package of worked up proposals to support a new or amended European legal/regulatory framework to bring high quality CDRs into the market. That package will contain pre-standards (in CEN format) covering requirements and methodologies for sampling, testing and QMS (ISO9000) upon which to build monitoring, reporting and verification systems. It will also include proposals to cover (a) environmental, social-impact and governance issues, and (b) the means of building trust in the market. This will encourage entrepreneurs to demonstrate effective and safe CDR projects and to make large investments, thus allowing the market to evolve to tackle the climate crisis. The C-SINK consortium includes organizations from 11 countries with complementary skills and expertise in the different CDR technologies, the writing of CEN and ISO standards, climate law, carbon trading, and in all of the relevant environmental and social issues.