Projects

The global climate crisis is not only an ecological crisis but also an economic, social and political crisis, with devastating impacts on individuals and societies. These negative impacts are not evenly distributed within societies. It is the poorer, marginalised and vulnerable groups who are the most acutely affected, exacerbating existing socio-economic inequalities

ACCTING is an EU-funded project aiming to understand the impact of Green Deal policies on vulnerable groups, prevent inequalities, and produce knowledge and innovations to advance behavioural change at individual and collective levels for an inclusive and equal European Green Deal.

Objectives:

• Understand
  the impact of Green Deal policy initiatives on individual and collective behaviours with specific attention to vulnerable groups.
• Empower
  policymakers and other stakeholders to anticipate and mitigate the potential negative impacts of policies on inequalities.
• Co-creatively design
  and implement pilot actions to be deployed by policymakers and stakeholders in the policy domains of the Green Deal.

ECSA together with the project partners will develop operational guidelines and recommendations for the decision makers, policy makers, and civil society organizations and economic employers. These recommendations and guidelines will be focused on how to develop policies and corroborate their adaptation to initiate individual and collective behavioral changes for a positive input to green deal policies.

Methodology

Running until May 2025, ACCTING is based on two research and innovation cycles, each cycle consisting of four steps:

RESEARCH
ACCTING research is based on eight research lines, defining the thematic focus of the project and generating 41 experimental studies in 13 countries.
The research phase includes an extensive mapping and comparative analysis of 150 bottom-up environmental initiatives in 34 countries and the collection of 410 interviews with individuals from vulnerable groups

CREATIVITY
This is a co-creation step, which interprets the results coming from the research stage in the multi-disciplinary, multi-actor co-design format of Open Studios. There are 4 Open Studios in each cycle.

SOLUTIONS
This step develops insights to operational and actionable solutions at three levels:

• formulates operational guidelines and recommendations to policymakers on how to improve Green Deal policies, anticipating behaviour and avoiding increases in inequalities;
• uses the results of experimental lines and Open Studios to launch a set of 10 Pilot Actions that operationalises the recommendations, increases their visibility and potential, and demonstrates their potential impact;
• develops agendas for future research based on the knowledge gaps and open questions identified and concepts co-designed in the Open Studios

OUTCOMES
The focus of this step is to maximise the impact of the work done through:

• dissemination of project result, communication and advocacy activities
• in-depth evaluation of the impacts of the experimental and pilot activities

BioAgora is a collaborative European project funded by the Horizon Europe programme. It aims to connect research results on biodiversity to the needs of decision-making in a targeted dialogue between scientists, other knowledge holders and policy actors.

Its main outcome will be the development of a fair and functional Science Service for Biodiversity, that will orchestrate processes and initiatives at the Science-Policy Interface at the European level.

BioAgora will go beyond the state of the art by co-creating new ways of bridging the gap between science, practice, and policy, which will be used as a basis for the development of the Science Service for Biodiversity.

Assessing the barriers and opportunities for improved policy integration of citizen science for biodiversity at local, national and EU scale such that recommendations can be made for better policy uptake at all levels

How will the project achieve its goals? BioAgora partners will:

• Develop the Science Service for Biodiversity’s governance structure and systems model by testing it in real life and iteratively improving it over the project’s duration resulting in a fully functional service
• Design demonstration cases across EU Member States that ratchet up the implementation of biodiversity commitments as planned in the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030
• Analyse the existing landscape of Science-Policy Interfaces, assess their policy tools and the current biodiversity knowledge held in Europe
• Provide tailored pathways on how better orchestrate science-policy interactions to support the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030
• Provide capacity building to empower the EU community of decision-makers and knowledge providers in bringing transformative change for biodiversity
• Engage with a broad range of actors such as policymakers, scientists, businesses, and citizens.

The overall objective of ECS is to widen and strengthen the European Citizen Science community through capacity building and awareness raising activities such as the creation of a European Citizen Science Academy and the establishment of a network of 28 ECS Ambassadors. ECS will capitalise on EU-funded actions such as the EU-Citizen.Science platform and Cos4Cloud to support links and collaboration between members of the European Citizen Science community, who will be involved in the co-design and co-creation of a large variety of services, strategic priorities, training opportunities and policy recommendations. A key focus is on inclusivity, which will be achieved through dedicated actions such as engaging libraries affiliated to the Public Libraries 2030 network to attract underrepresented publics, as well as ad-hoc support to countries/regions lacking citizen science networks, platforms and policy recognition. ECS will create extensive capacity building opportunities by engaging in particular excellent researchers in a variety of disciplines, for example through the involvement of the Marie Curie Alumni Association, and emerging Horizon Europe Missions, Clusters, and wider ERA activities, to allow easy access for newcomers in citizen science activities.

ECS is committed to push modern science towards open science as its modus operandi by providing open collaborative spaces where citizen scientists can familiarise with the concept of “open and FAIR data with open and FAIR tools” and get actively engaged, while connecting with existing e-infrastructures such as EOSC through the collaborative development of data/metadata services. The engagement of the Global Citizen Science Partnership will guarantee wide international cooperation. These efforts will result in a number of key scientific, societal and policy impacts which will strongly contribute to securing Europe’s global position as a leader in citizen science throughout the entire research and innovation system.