The overall objective of ACCLIMATE is to achieve enhanced integrated national and international strategies for climate-resilient, low-emission development. ACCLIMATE will contribute to improving the transparency, consistency, and clarity of GHG emission reduction commitments and create appropriate tools by developing an assessment framework for mitigation commitments. Working in a bottom-up manner with national experts within an international consortium comprising high-emitting countries from the Americas, Asia and Europe, as well as low-emitting countries from West Africa, ACCLIMATE will identify needs for improvements of NDCs and long-term strategies. A focus will be set on adequacy, fairness and feasibility, as well as on needs for improving current policies and measures to actually achieve NDCs and long-term objectives. On this basis, the development of enhanced national strategies and pathways will similarly build on existing scientific national expertise and models, with the development of enhanced pathways for all focus countries being undertaken by the respective partners of the consortium based in these countries, with support from European partners. These pathways will include an increased understanding of the role of ecosystems, non-CO2 gases, and climate impacts and risks, and socioeconomic tradeoffs. The development of enhanced pathways and policy recommendations will build on sectoral deep dives in order to fully capture sector-specific mitigation enablers and barriers. ACCLIMATE will in particular focus on the sectors industry, buildings, AFOLU, transport, and energy supply. ACCLIMATE will enhance the capacity in partner countries to develop and model mitigation strategies and pathways and to analyse and develop respective policy strategies and packages. Furthermore, enhanced strategies will be closely co-created with policy-makers and stakeholders at the national, sectoral and international levels.

As the world faces the risks of dangerous climate change, policy-makers, industry and civil society leaders are counting on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to inform and guide strategies to deliver on the objectives of the Paris Agreement (PA). ENGAGE rises to this challenge by engaging these stakeholders in co-producing a new generation of global and national decarbonisation pathways. These new pathways will supplement natural science, engineering and economics, traditionally represented in IAMs, with cutting-edge insights from social science in order to reflect multidimensional feasibility of decarbonisation and identify opportunities to strengthen climate policies. The pathways will be designed to minimise overshoot of the temperature target and analyse the timing of net-zero emissions to meet the Paris temperature target and reduce the reliance on controversial negative emissions technologies. In addition, they will link national mitigation strategies of major emitters with the PA’s objectives, integrate potential game-changing innovations, and advance conceptually novel approaches to architectures of international climate agreements. ENGAGE will also quantify avoided impacts of climate change, co-benefits and trade-offs of climate policy, and identify the biggest sectoral opportunities for climate change mitigation. In ENGAGE, we will set new standards of transparency for global and national IAMs. The new pathways will be developed in an iterative global and national stakeholder process and a consortium of leading global and national IAMs and social scientists. This co-production process ensures that the pathways are credible, legitimate, and rooted in concrete policy and industry experience, making them relevant to inform the 2023 global stocktake and feed into the mid-century strategies of major emitters.

Engineering has a pivotal role to play in solving humanitarian challenges, enabling communities to progress towards sustainable development. Because the issues of humanitarianism are not just engineering problems, there is need to introduce new designs of engineering education to embrace and exploit combinational expertise in community-based engineering. ENHANCE aims at nurturing humanitarian attributes through engineering education for serving unsupported communities effectively and responsibly, in identifying problems and defining sustainable solutions. The novelty of ENHANCE lies in integrating highly diverse, yet complementary, expertise in engineering Higher Education (HE). The objectives of the project involve: (a) mapping professional attributes for mitigating humanitarian challenges over the next 15 years; (b) assessing and evaluating current graduate engineering programmes in Partner Institutions under the enablers needed to ensure humanitarian attributes to graduates; (c) setting up tools for evaluating graduate engineering programmes; (c) building capacity in the field of community-based engineering with interventions in curriculum content, assessment and feedback, methods of delivery; (d) tasting, adopting and implementing in current curricula innovative (i.e. inclusive, interdisciplinary, problem-based) teaching and learning methodologies; (e) developing and testing the ENHANCE Training Kit for staff development/training. Outputs of the project will be disseminated to audiences from HE educators and students in the partner countries; modern media (podcasts, video’s, etc.) will be utilised to share insights with a wide audience. ENHANCE will allow us to ensure advancement of community-based engineering directly to a range of Official Development Assistance (ODA) recipients and to instigate longer-term developments with beneficiaries and end users. Nevertheless, outputs of this project will be applicable to many other countries facing global challenges.

Over the last decade, the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has built a distributed computing and data infrastructure to support over 21,000 researchers from many disciplines with unprecedented data analysis capabilities. EGI builds on the European and national investments and relies on the expertise of EGI.eu - a not-for-profit foundation that provides coordination to the EGI Community, including user groups, EGI.eu participants in the EGI Council, and the other collaborating partners. The mission of EGI-Engage is to accelerate the implementation of the Open Science Commons vision, where researchers from all disciplines have easy and open access to the innovative digital services, data, knowledge and expertise they need for their work. The Open Science Commons is grounded on three pillars: the e-Infrastructure Commons, an ecosystem of key services; the Open Data Commons, where any researcher can access, use and reuse data; and the Knowledge Commons, in which communities have shared ownership of knowledge and participate in the co-development of software and are technically supported to exploit state-of-the-art digital services. EGI-Engage will expand the capabilities offered to scientists (e.g. improved cloud or data services) and the spectrum of its user base by engaging with large Research Infrastructures (RIs), the long-tail of science and industry/SMEs. The main engagement instrument will be a network of eight Competence Centres, where National Grid Initiatives (NGIs), user communities, technology and service providers will join forces to collect requirements, integrate community-specific applications into state-of-the-art services, foster interoperability across e-Infrastructures, and evolve services through a user-centric development model. The project will also coordinate the NGI efforts to support the long-tail of science by developing ad hoc access policies and by providing services and resources that will lower barriers and learning curves.