The amount of freshwater available has drastically decreased due to rapid population growth, industrialization, and recurring dry extremes. Merely 3% of freshwater makes up all of Earth's water resources, with saline water making up the other 97%. One-fifth of the world's population, according to the World Health Organization, resides in nations where freshwater is scarce. For this reason, desalination of seawateror brackish water is one of the essential solutions to the worldwide problem of water scarcity. However, the main barriers to the general adoption of desalination systems are the substantial upfront technology costs, and the large amount of energy that is needed for the technological processes. The major goal of AQUASOL is to develop a technological platform that enables the massive penetration of renewable energy sources into the desalination technology with no impact on the power network and providing disruptive, energy-efficient solutions for saline/brackish water pre-treatment and filtration, as well as brine and wastewater recycling. The system will be supplied with hybrid energy storage system and connected to the modular fault-tolerant multiport converter. This approach will help not only to reduce number of power electronics converters, provide both long-term and short-term energy storage capabilities, stabilize the system against intermittent renewable energy inputs but also support grid-independent operation in remote or island scenarios. A combination of novel two-dimensional material-based membranes and specific chemicals for seawater and wastewater treatment will be developed. To maintain minimum energy consumption during operation, the model-based energy management system will be developed, too. This closed-loop approach minimizes waste and maximizes resource utilization for irrigation in agriculture. The concept will address and investigate societal challenges of technology adoption and measures to overcome identified challeges

Rural BioReFarmeries brings together farmers, industries and other partners across Europe, to demonstrate a farmer-centred bioeconomy model aimed at maximizing the potential of Europe’s vast grasslands. The project will demonstrate a novel small-scale, decentralized, rural green biorefinery value chain, which addresses the limitations of existing green biorefineries. This small-scale decentralized model places farmers at the centre of the biomass value creation close to their farms, allowing them to co-produce inputs for their farms, with additional high value-added intermediates and products, which will be further developed in collaboration with centralized facilities and downstream industry partners. The model provides a practical implementation of the bioeconomy among a large farmer cohort and builds on the existing farm enterprises and cooperative structures of our partners, enabling collaboration, scale-up, market access, and building synergies across primary and industrial sectors. The project advances state-of-the-art for green biorefinery in terms of operational model, logistics, processing, product development and assessment methods, which collectively deliver a more sustainable and profitable model for farmers and rural communities. The model will serve as a blueprint for farmers to sustainably diversify into the bioeconomy, reducing their farm emissions while creating new products which displace unsustainable alternatives in a range of agri-food markets. Rural BioReFarmeries model will be replicated to diverse regions of Europe, supported by the development of inclusive business models and hands-on training among multi-actor groups and communities in regions of high potential. The project represents a highly replicable model for Europe’s abundant grasslands, helping farmers to deal with sustainability and profitability challenges while helping rural communities to become more resilient while realizing the potential of their local bioresources.

Τhe strategic objective of SPADE is to develop an Intelligent Ecosystem to address the multiple purposes concept in the light of deploying UAVs to promote sustainable digital services for the benefit of a large scope of various end users in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, and livestock. This includes individual UAV usability, UAV type applicability (e.g., swarm, collaborative, autonomous, tethered), UAV governance models availability and trustworthiness. Multi-purposes will be further determined in the sensing dataspace reusability based on trained AI/Machine Learning (ML) models. These will enable sustainability and resilience of the overall life cycle of developing, setting up, offering, providing, testing, validating, refining as well as enhancing digital transformations and ‘innovation building’ services in Forestry, Cropping and Livestock Farming. Pilot prototypes will contribute towards greater challenges such as deforestation, precision cropping and animal welfare. First, SPADE will create a digital platform that is able to realise the potential benefits to be reaped from the use of drones. This platform is making drone operations better accessible and controllable, as well as providing a service channel for value added services enabled by drones. Second, SPADE is demonstrating three innovative use cases of drones making use of the digital platform. While demonstrating the use cases, the benefits coming from the use of drones are analysed and quantified, on a detailed stakeholder level basis. This will demonstrate the new business opportunities. The demonstrations/pilots will also serve as an analysis platform to investigate the regulatory framework at international and national level. Open calls will provide 12 further use cases.

The current European plant-protein landscape is flawed. Heightened societal awareness of the environmental impact of consuming animal-based protein is driving the public’s awareness of alternative, sustainable sources of dietary protein. Yet, production systems are focussed heavily on the production of feedstock for direct transfer into animal sectors in an attempt to counter the EU’s over-dependency on imported feed. In essence, there is an absence of premium supply chains - farmers miss out on added-value opportunities that exist within the crops they already grow across Europe. There is a need to increase resilience in farming systems to mitigate against increasingly volatile climate patterns and to support farming systems to meet Farm-to-Fork strategic objectives. Built on the principles of co-creation, innovation and demonstration, VALPRO Path will design, validate and deliver sustainable and competitive plant protein crop systems and value chains. Focussed on underpinning economic value for all actors in the supply chain, it will exploit beyond state-of-the-art innovations, demonstrating and evaluating potential across 5 multi-stakeholder ‘living lab’ innovation production systems (IPSs). With strong industry involvement, the project will deliver a stronger ecosystem for plant protein production, supported with robust evidence of the social, economic, environmental, climate and health benefits. VALPRO Path will deliver new, sustainable business models, showing how focussed research can come into practice. Sustainable diversification of rotations with grain legumes will support the transition to more environmentally sustainable farming. European agriculture is at a juncture in regards to the sustainable provision of dietary protein. It can embrace opportunities presented through existing innovations that are integrated into real-life scenarios to support stakeholders realise the new market opportunities that exist for indigenous, fully traceable plant protein.