"EGD4cities takes inspiration from existing initiatives, aiming to implement a general concept and approach to greening human capital and economy referred to the wider approach to sustainability introducing skills linked to the transition to a circular and greener economy. Τhe project has the specific objective to enhance the required green skills for workforce by improving its technical capacities, knowledge, values and attitudes to develop and support sustainable social, economic and environmental outcomes in business, industry and the community. More specifically, this project aims to provide a training material for local authorities’ staff on how to put the European Green Deal into practice at the local level, and respect the UN Sustainable Development Goal 13 ""Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"", SDG 11 ""Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable"", as well as to relevant targets of other SDGs. Also, a pilot training course will be held for testing and making adjustments on developed material.Generally, the project is meant to get involved local authorities which are in charge of a variety of environmental services related to noise or air pollution, waste disposal, consumer education and protection, or city planning which directly affect the health of local citizens and impact the environment. The project's specific goal is to capacitate local authorities staff and NGO leaders for change engagement, developing green sectoral skills and fostering leadership skills, creativity, socio-educational and professional development, through Local Authorities’ and NGOs’ action. Its specific objectives are to help these target groups to keep up-to-date with science and policy on EU level, as well as to enhance their competences in various sustainability-relevant sectors by improving and extending the supply of high quality learning opportunities for adults, under the perspective of lifelong learning. Under the EGD4cities an Assessment Methodology for valorizing / creating European Green Deal local policies (IO1) will be developed in order to enhance local authorities' staff role on assistant provision of climate change. Also, a ""Transformative Mindset Course on EGD4cities"" (IO2) will be created by the partnership to increase and deepens the knowledge and competences of local authorities staff working in the decision making positions how to resilience climate change in local level.Moreover, ""Peer to Peer Success Stories videos"" (IO3) will play an important role on the project's implementation as they will motivate the target group, encourage them to change attitudes and adopt a new mindset, inspire people and organisations to become involved and encourage sustainable behaviours.As a last action, the partnership has the objective to develop a ""Virtual Think Tank"" (IO4) where information and resources about environmental actions in local levels and training opportunities will be shared, in order to increase the capacity and skills of stakeholders to handle each individual request for assistance and consultancy on environmental and climate changing sector . As a result the project expects to create clear and tangible benefits for all stakeholders involved, by support a sustainable improvement of the their basic skills and competences on leadership, citizenship, green actions and social change for the environment, the regions and local communities. Furthermore, EGD4cities will promote the well-being of citizens, providing coherent response to the challenges facing the environmental sector by complementing and adding value to existing initiatives. The consortium declares that the EGD4citis project will have both international and local impact on social cohesion, integration and inclusion, with benefits and more opportunities for all."

The countries in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region and in the former Soviet Union republics (CIS region) have the most energy-poor people in Europe. Main reasons contributing to energy poverty for people with low income are due to high energy prices and poor energy efficiency of the buildings, building heating systems and household appliances. The ComAct project is focusing on these regions and in particular on their specificity that the housing stock (characterised with large percentage of multi-family apartment blocks) is predominantly in private ownership and consequently energy-poor households live in their privately-owned apartments. To address the complex roots of energy poverty, there is a need to develop a new approach in order to influence the energy costs substantially and make the energy efficiency (EE) interventions affordable, and consequently reduce the high energy poverty level in the CEE and CIS region. The ComAct project aims to make high-impact/high-cost energy-efficient improvements in multi-family apartment buildings in the CEE and CIS regions affordable and manageable for energy-poor communities as well as to create the necessary assistance conditions for lifting them out of energy poverty. To achieve this main goal, firstly, an approach to identification and selection of energy-poor communities is developed, followed by interventions in three main dimensions: 1) empowering and activating the communities of homeowners’ associations; 2) developing/adapting financial tools that provide financing for low income families; and 3) optimising technical solutions that provide most favourable cost-benefit ratio for the energy efficient improvements at a multi-family apartment building level. In order to demonstrate applicability, benefits and potential for alleviating energy poverty, 5 pilot cases take place in Hungary, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Lithuania and Ukraine.

TiCCA4Danu proposes a novel and comprehensive transformative innovation framework to accelerate just climate change adaptation (CCA) at the level of cities and their surrounding administrative regions. In order to address the structural barriers for CCA implementation at the city-region level, TiCCA4Danu proposes a systems-level approach, which requires effective governance changes, introduction of directionality, and a different use of policy instruments favouring discovery and experimentation processes. TiCCA4Danu directly relates to the EU Cities- and Adaptation Mission frameworks and builds on the emerging literature discussing the opportunities and limitations to governing socio-technical change for addressing grand challenges, such as climate change, through novel transformative approaches. At the core of TiCCA4Danu's methodological approach lies the concept of place-based “Transformative Innovation Policy” (TIP), which postulates a systems-level change perspective in innovation policy. TiCCA4Danu aims at applying the theoretical TIP concept to the city-region level by linking TIP to “Local Green Deals” (LGD), an established instrument for sustainable transformation at the city level, and by complementing the LGDs with a novel approach for transformative CCA at the level of regions. With TIP facilitating wider and inclusive societal transformation, TiCCA4Danu features stronger involvement of vulnerable groups as well as stronger private sector involvement. TiCCA4Danu focussing its activities on four "Anchor Cities" and their surrounding regions in the Danube Macro Region, all constituting different bio-geographical regions, i.e. Coastal, Mountain and Continental. By establishing a direct link to the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR) and by working with the relevant Priority Area Working Groups, TiCCA4Danu will scale results up to the Macro-Regional level. Applicability at the EU level will be tested as part of the EU's "Week of Regions and Cities".

Making the bridge from the first to the second implementation phase of the Mission Ocean and Waters (MOW), CO-WATERS will strengthen the growing momentum by developing and animating a Coalition of waterfront cities, regions, islands and third parties (e.g. universities, NGOs, investors etc) supporting these in their local journeys to reach the MOW objectives. CO-WATERS will deliver to the Coalition a wide range of networking, knowledge exchange and support services (twinning, working groups, interactive trainings, advisory support) to further empower Coalition members to think and act systemically, engage citizens and local stakeholders and enhance access to funding and financing streams that will support their MOW transition journey (WP1, WP2, WP3, WP5), as per their needs (modular approach). At the same time, in close collaboration with the EC Mission Ocean and Waters Secretariat and in line with existing labelling schemes (e.g. Cities Mission Label, Sustainable Island Label), CO-WATERS will develop the MOW Label (WP4) and will pilot the Label application process with two waves of applicants, who will receive tailored support. The services provided by CO-WATERS will be appropriately sequenced so that Coalition members receiving these can also smoothly apply for the MOW Label – without having to follow new processes / trainings / courses of action which will stretch their limited resources. In order to maximise value for Coalition members and ensure alignment and coherence, the project will strongly align and build on key actors and activities in the EU COM and the EU Missions’ space, as well as other related EU and international initiatives and projects (including investor networks).

AI4PublicPolicy is a joint effort of policymakers and Cloud/AI experts to unveil AI’s potential for automated, transparent and citizen-centric development of public policies. To this end, the project will deliver, validate, demonstrate and promote a novel Open Cloud platform (i.e. AI4PublicPolicy platform) for automated, scalable, transparent and citizen-centric policy management based on unique AI technologies. The AI4PublicPolicy platform will be an Open Virtualized Policy Management Environment (VPME) that will provide fully-fledged policy development/management functionalities based on AI technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), NLP and chatbots, while leveraging citizens’ participation and feedback. It will support the entire policy development lifecycle, based on technologies for the extraction, simulation, evaluation and optimization of interoperable and reusable public policies, with emphasis on citizen-centric policies development and optimization through the realization of citizen-oriented feedback loops. AI4PublicPolicy will complement public policy development functionalities with the ever-important process reengineering and organization transformation activities towards ensuring the effective transition from legacy policy development models to emerging AI-based policymaking. The AI4PublicPolicy VPME will be integrated with EOSC with a dual objective. First to facilitate access to the Cloud and HPC resources of EOSC/EGI that are required to enable the project’s AI tools, and second to boost the sustainability and wider use of the project’s developments. AI4PublicPolicy’s business plan for sustaining, expanding and commercializing the AI tools and the VPME is based on the development of a community of interested and engaged stakeholders (i.e. public authorities and other policymakers) around the project’s platform.