Aquaculture is one of five sectors in the EU's Blue Growth Strategy, aimed at harnessing untapped potential for food production and jobs whilst focusing on environmental sustainability. TAPAS addresses this challenge by supporting member states to establish a coherent and efficient regulatory framework aimed at sustainable growth. TAPAS will use a requirements analysis to evaluate existing regulatory and licensing frameworks across the EU, taking account of the range of production environments and specificities and emerging approaches such as offshore technologies, integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, and integration with other sectors. We will propose new, flexible approaches to open methods of coordination, working to unified, common standards. TAPAS will also evaluate existing tools for economic assessment of aquaculture sustainability affecting sectoral growth. TAPAS will critically evaluate the capabilities and verification level of existing ecosystem planning tools and will develop new approaches for evaluation of carrying capacities, environmental impact and future risk. TAPAS will improve existing and develop new models for far- and near-field environmental assessment providing better monitoring, observation, forecasting and early warning technologies. The innovative methodologies and components emerging from TAPAS will be integrated in an Aquaculture Sustainability Toolbox complemented by a decision support system to support the development and implementation of coastal and marine spatial planning enabling less costly, more transparent and more efficient licensing. TAPAS partners will collaborate with key industry regulators and certifiers through case studies to ensure the acceptability and utility of project approach and outcomes. Training, dissemination and outreach activities will specifically target improvement of the image of European aquaculture and uptake of outputs by regulators, while promoting an integrated sustainable strategy for development.

ActFast aims to identify, validate, and demonstrate climate change adaptation and mitigation solutions tailored for European aquaculture, alongside opportunities to increase sustainable production. Targeting regions where aquaculture is deeply integrated into the socio-economic fabric, the project will map climate hazards across the Mediterranean Sea, Deltas, Central-Eastern European inland waters, and North-East Atlantic Ocean, utilizing historical data, predictions, stakeholder insights, and satellite surveys. Integrating this comprehensive data analysis, the project will develop a user-friendly early warning system for the Mediterranean region empowering aquafarmers to proactively manage and mitigate climate risks. ActFast will promote the development of fast and replicable climate solutions for marine, transitional, and freshwater aquaculture by integrating climate prediction models with targeted solutions in four target regions. Given the unique impacts and sensitivities of the targeted areas and aquaculture systems, ActFast aims to design mitigation strategies that consider both regional and species-specific characteristics, boosting the productive efficiency, health, and well-being of farmed fish and mollusks struggling against climate change's impacts, increasing and diversifying production in coastal and rural areas, promoting economic growth and community resilience, and minimizing environmental impact and shrinking European aquaculture's carbon footprint. The proposed innovations will be shared through an inclusive dissemination and communication plan, while the market uptake of the results and outputs will be ensured by a detailed exploitation strategy. To achieve maximum exploitation, dissemination, and knowledge transfer, ActFast will develop and implement a "Virtual ActFast Lighthouse", an immersive demo-training virtual reality collecting data from diverse experiments and field operations conducted across multiple work packages.