The objective of InnoForESt is to spark a transformation of the European forest sector by stimulating innovations for the sustainable supply and financing of forest ecosystem services. The project will support the governance of viable innovations and a multi-actor network by building on pioneer policy tools and business models, by establishing new alliances, and by involving key stakeholders from forest and forest-related policy, administration and business. InnoForESt will establish six real world pilots that represent a range of successful coordination approaches and business models. The project will facilitate the transfer and up-scaling of existing niche models identified and the development of new innovations, to demonstrate the feasibility of alternative income streams from a diverse set forest ecosystem services. The case study regions represent a variety of biophysical conditions and institutional settings across Europe. The core elements of InnoForESt are: (i) multi-actor networks, (ii) digital and physical innovation platforms, (iii) facilitated innovation processes for business and policy making, (iv) information generation and support for future national and EU forest policy making. Within the networks, stakeholders will exchange ideas, knowledge and practices. InnoForESt has already engaged a broad set of practice partners to establish the core of the networks. The innovation platforms will function as hubs and as spaces for exchange and learning. The project will scale up the results to the European level, making use of the thorough understanding of Europe’s social-ecological landscape as well as sustainability impacts of different governance mechanisms. The lessons will feed into a roadmap for the provision of forest ecosystem service bundles and a broad range of dissemination and communication activities. Ultimately, this will lead to better policy coordination, the well-being of EU citizens and the ecological integrity of forest ecosystems.

The Wat.Edu project was created within the framework of the Erasmus KA2 application. Our main goal was the elaboration of an innovative supplementary learning material that helps the teachers with the improvement of students aged 12-14 concerning their water-related knowledge. The Wat.Edu Handbook and the Methodological Guide together with the E-learning toolkit based on gamification are the results of great cooperation. Four schools and NGOs of four countries – Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary- worked together to create a flexible, modern learning material.The elaboration of the theoretical part was the responsibility of professional institutions dealing with environmental education and sustainability, while the methodology was based on the experiences of the participating schools. With this Handbook, our aim was to provide the teachers dealing with 12-14-year-old students with easy-to-use, inspiring methodological material, which can also enhance the creative thinking of students.We speak about a cross-curricular topic, yet we felt it needed to relate in some way to the subject frameworks used in educational structures. Therefore, we separated the tasks and activities according to the following subjects: Biology, Geography, Chemistry-Physics, and Arts. The separation is only of a technical nature, the development of a complex approach has been an important aspect for us all along, we wanted to present this important element of our environment from the aspect of several subjects.The three years of the project process was greatly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, especially concerning digital education. To react to this, our partnership elaborated O3, an extra supplementary material besides the Handbook, which can be used effectively in online education.During the period of testing the innovative professional material, we actively operated Water Club groups consisting of a community of children, where the goal was to test the curriculum in practice. In addition, we presented the developed professional material to interested teachers and heads of institutions in the framework of continuous teacher workshop sessions. At the national dissemination events, in addition to teachers, representatives of universities, colleges and other interested parties involved in teacher training were also given information about the work done. The feedback from the educators and the experience of the Water Club sessions helped a lot in shaping the final form of the Handbook and e-learning.We permanently informed the public on the Wat.Edu website, on our official Facebook site, via newsletters, and the various channels of media.Very important milestones of the project process were the three-day-long online international teacher training and the student camp. The latter was also organized as a virtual event. These programs provided opportunities to test the project outputs in real situations. Compared to the planned format. we had to redesign these project elements due to the Covid. Despite the aggravating factors, we were able to provide useful experiences and spent memorable time together.Educational institutions are showing great interest in the completed project products, which is a positive result in itself, but it is not enough. After the end of the epidemic situation, it will hopefully be possible to implement demonstration sessions for interested schools, counseling for mentoring, and support for the adaptation process. The goal is to use the developed professional material as widely as possible in order to educate students about the environment and protect water.