The Ocean plays a crucial role in the global C cycle, taking up approximately 25% of the CO2 we emit to the atmosphere, and thus slowing the rate of climate change. The future trajectory of this sink will affect the timing and intensity of the modifications to human processes that we need to undertake in order to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at 450ppm. Our ability to measure and model this sink is limited (evidenced by significant discrepancies between measured and modelled C uptake) with the current frontier area of research being a suite of biological processes related to higher trophic level behaviour within the so called biological C pump. This involvement of higher organisms suggests that human activities (fishing, energy and mineral extraction) has the capacity to affect the ocean C sink however we lack the ability to quantitatively link direct human pressures and ocean C storage. Ocean ICU will measure these key processes and evaluate their overall significance, transferring those that are important into models that inform the IPCC process and in this way contribute to resolving the observed model data mismatch of Ocean C sink estimates. We will use the fundamental knowledge we acquire around biological systems to evaluate the ability of human interventions in the ocean to alter the carbon cycle and produce management tools that allow the tension between resource extraction and C storage to be addressed. This component will involve extensive dialogue with end users and stakeholders and lead to a Decision Support Tool that will

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The EU-funded OEMC project will provide the open-Earth-monitor cyberinfrastructure to accelerate Europe’s capability to process high-quality, user-friendly, environmental information, based on Earth observation (EO) data. The developed cyber-infrastructure will be secured in FAIR data principles and existing platforms related to EO will be leveraged to a higher level. This will allow the monitoring of essential biodiversity indicators and the registering of natural capital accounts for private and public sectors, allowing businesses to improve their competitive advantage through the EU Green Deal and European citizens to have a better quality of life.

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This contract will develop improved algorithms to produce long term ocean reanalyses in the presence of varying observational networks. It will be focused on consistency of climate relevant metrics across 2 periods of increasing observational coverage, in the 1950’s and in the 1980s-90s as altimeter observations become available. The role of different atmospheric forcing and riverine inputs will be tested and the ensemble error covariance approaches suitable for both sparse will be developed and more dense observing networks. It will also address the detection of bias in the assimilated results and make recommendations on how best to treat bias under varying observational conditions. Finally new post-processed smoothing methods to more fully use observations and to spread information back to influence more sparsely observed periods will be applied. A set of Recommendations will be made to CMEMS to aid in the production of a climate- consistent long period ocean reanalysis in the final report.

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The European Commission’s Directorate General for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG ECHO), under the framework of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM), supports countries and regions to review their disaster risk management (DRM) policies and practices by taking stock of strengths and areas for improvements and putting forward recommendations to increase resilience. The objective of the UCPM Peer review programme is to implement, over a period of 36 months a cycle of peer reviews targeting a maximum of six countries/regions wishing to have their disaster risk management/civil protection system reviewed. UCPM peer reviews promote an integrated approach to DRM by taking a comprehensive look at risk governance, risk assessment, risk management planning, and all stages of the disaster risk management cycle. The peer review process fosters policy dialogue and coherence, facilitates mutual learning and exchange of good practice, and steers progress in critical areas for the EU cooperation on civil protection and disaster risk management. CMCC will support DG ECHO in the implementation of the overall programme, both technically and logistically.

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PHAROS is an EU-funded project, led by the Canary Islands Ocean Platform (PLOCAN), and implemented by a consortium of 24 organizations, which aims to provide nature-based solutions for restoring ecosystems and biodiversity while tackling climate change and human impacts in the Atlantic and Arctic maritime regions. These goals align with the European Union’s ambitious Ocean Mission objectives. The PHAROS project aligns with the European Union’s Ocean Mission by focusing on protecting and restoring marine ecosystems and biodiversity, eliminating pollution, and achieving a sustainable, carbon-neutral, and circular blue economy by 2030.

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PRUDENT aspires to revolutionize agriculture and forestry by promoting sustainable practices and innovative farming technologies. The project will explore the use of “nudges”, small changes in how farmers and foresters make decisions, to encourage them to adopt more sustainable approaches. These nudges will be tested in real-life situations alongside policy changes to see their combined effect on sustainability. Innovative tools, like web or mobile apps, will be developed to help farmers and foresters regulate their actions and make lasting changes, supporting these behaviour changes. Different types of farming and forestry systems across Europe will be studied to understand their unique challenges. The insights gained from this research will create new ways of thinking about agriculture and forestry, including social innovations, business models, and policy recommendations. 

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The RE-CONNECT project is dedicated to assisting the 196 Parties committed to the 2015 Paris Agreement, established under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, in meeting their climate change obligations.

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RENOVATE is an innovative experimental project whose main objective is the recovery of marine ecosystem functions and services impacted by the expansion of the Civitavecchia Port Hub. This includes the testing of restoration and mitigation interventions for the priority habitat 1120* and some biocoenoses of habitat 1170, as well as for two species of high natural and ecological importance: Corallium rubrum and Pinna nobilis. RENOVATE is the most ambitious ‘marine habitat restoration’ project carried out in Italy and probably in Europe. It envisions a series of interventions based on an innovative, holistic approach aimed at achieving the medium/long-term recovery goals of the functionality of impacted habitats and species, equivalent to what was lost due to the expansion of the Port Hub. RENOVATE is a project that will represent the state of the art in terms of scientific and technological innovation, and therefore places a central focus on the application of the most modern scientific criteria used internationally, with particular reference to the ecosystem approach and Nature-Based Solutions.

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Data and AI are the fuel of scientific discoveries, and Research Infrastructures (RIs) are at the forefront of this process, generating massive and increasingly more complex datasets. However, the growing size, diversity, and velocity of research data and software demand large-scale infrastructures and technical expertise from those on the user side. RI-SCALE will address this challenge by delivering Data Exploitation Platforms (DEPs). These scalable environments will co-host scientific data with preconfigured AI frameworks and models on powerful compute resources and unlock full data and AI potential for scientific users, RI operators and industry. RI-SCALE will design and develop the DEP technology with four RIs: ENES, EISCAT, BBMRI and Euro-BioImaging. DEP instances will be deployed for environmental and life sciences, validating the technology through 8 scientific and 4 technical use cases. These will run on national e-infrastructures from the EGI Federation and (pre)exascale machines from EuroHPC. RI-SCALE will collaborate with Destination Earth, EUCAIM cancer images data space, Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, EOSC and Gaia-X to ensure interoperability within the broader landscape. The project will also facilitate industry and university collaborations, provide training and consultancy events to increase the uptake of AI technologies by additional RIs and explore sustainable DEP operation models for RI communities.

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ROCCIA is a technical-scientific collaboration initiative between the CMCC Foundation and Roma Capitale, aimed at co-developing research tools to support the Comune di Roma in tackling the challenge of climate change adaptation. In line with the recent Adaptation Strategy (https://www.comune.roma.it/web-resources/cms/documents/Strategia-adattamento-climatico.pdf) approved by the Comune di Roma in January 2025, these tools will transform heterogeneous meteorological and climate data into clear, accessible, and useful information for various stakeholders. The results will provide a solid and reliable foundation for planning future climate adaptation interventions by the Comune di Roma and other involved entities.

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An international collaborative project to better understand the impact of amplified warming in polar regions, through the development of a new sea ice modelling paradigm. Through SASIP, the Scale-Aware Sea Ice Project, we propose to develop a truly innovative, scale-aware continuum sea ice model for climate research; one that faithfully represents sea ice dynamics and thermodynamics and that is physically sound, data-adaptive, highly parallelized and computationally efficient. SASIP will exploit large datasets from both granular process models and remote sensing to constrain sea ice properties and optimize continuum model parameters, jointly using data assimilation and machine learning methods. Coupling this multi-scale modeling framework to an ocean mixed-layer model, we will open up a new regime for polar oceanography via an examination of currently unresolved or poorly understood ice–ocean interactions across physical scales. In this systematic merger of models, observations, and numerical techniques, SASIP will reform sea ice modeling, a crucial leap needed to improve regional and larger-scale predictions of polar climate. Through the further development of neXtSIM and the MEB rheological framework, SASIP will build a data-constrained model that is rigorously based on sea ice solid-like physics. This model will allow improved high resolution and large- scale predictions of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and the propagation of sea ice related climate feedbacks. Employing hybrid data assimilation and machine learning approaches as a native part of the model architecture will allow for objective combinations of model and data. Ultimately, SASIP will lead to reduced uncertainties related to the impact of

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The SCEWERO project will be developed by a consortium of 5 organizations from 4 countries: Babeș-Bolyai University (UBB), a research institution located in Romania as a widening country and acting as coordinator, three top-class leading partners, Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo Sui Cambiamenti Climatici (IT), Universiteit Antwerpen (BE), and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (DE), and a private partner (SME), Indeco Soft (RO) aiming to improve the excellence capacity in research, to raise the scientific reputation, research profile and attractiveness through networking, and strengthening research management capacity and administrative skills of the UBB team.

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