Cities and regions in Europe (EU) and Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC) face shared and urgent global-local challenges to integrate practical actions with strategies to achieve greater inclusion, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental quality. Many cities share problems of landscape fragmentation caused by rapid growth, urban sprawl and economic restructuring. Poorly planned urbanisation leaves a legacy of cities lacking the green areas needed for ecosystems to provide the services essential to human life. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have the potential to help reverse these trends, and our combined EU-CELAC palette of socio-cultural, ecological and governance contexts represents a huge opportunity to move forward - faster, together. CONEXUS will co-produce, structure and promote access to the shared, contextualised knowledge needed to support cities and communities to co-create NBS, and to restore urban ecosystems, to help drive the required step-change in urban policy and practice in EU and CELAC countries. It adopts a planetary health perspective: healthy landscapes and ecosystems are vital to support human life, and humanity must restore, create and care for these landscapes and ecosystems in a reciprocal, ongoing and iterative relationship. This transdisciplinary project uses nature-based thinking (NBT) to bring together community, private, public and research partners to meet this challenge, and experiments with novel co-production methods to deliver NBS innovations in ‘Life-Lab’ pilots. The project’s core concept is to co-create context-appropriate NBS for ecosystems restoration and sustainable urbanisation in CELAC and EU cities, using a place-based approach (place-making, place-keeping and place-prescribing), solving problems together with citizens. The CONEXUS cities are: in CELAC - São Paulo, Bogotá, Santiago and Buenos Aires; and in the EU - Lisbon, Barcelona and Turin.

Global environmental and climate changes compromise forest resources in different ways, intensities and at various levels. Drought related losses in growth performance, the increase in intensity and frequency of wild fires and storms, and of biological risks are just a few of the most perceptible effects across the forests in Europe as well worldwide. Global change weakens the efficiency of forest carbon sequestration capacity and thus forestry sector ability to mitigate climate changes in the medium to long-term perspective. An innovative adaptive and integrative forest management plays a key role in driving forests to face the environmental changes and to meet both maintaining high forest carbon sequestration potential and guaranteeing economic efficient and more ecological sound forest operations. ETN Skill-For.Action integrates the fundamental research in forest ecology and applied science of forest engineering. This integration is crucial and innovative to comprehensibly understand carbon dynamics in forests in terms of feedback between carbon sequestrations and release. Overarching objective of ETN Skill-For.Action is to provide high-level training and education in adaptive and integrative forest management under global changes to a new generation of early stage researchers for a successful career in the forest-sector and natural resource management. The education follows an innovative, interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach by a specific and unique combination of applied research and training activities delivered by academic and non-academic partners to strengthen complementary soft skills. ETN Skill-For.Action will support each ESR to successfully implement their individual project through a well defined supervising strategy by merging the educational experience of the academic supervisors with the practical knowledge of the non-academic supervisors.

ROSEWOOD4.0 builds on the well-established ROSEWOOD network of Regional Hubs connecting multiple actors along the forest value chain to reinforce the sustainability of wood mobilisation in Europe. The new action will especially reinforce and enlarge the links with Eastern Europe by creating a new Eastern Hub including new countries (Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine). Secondly, the action puts special emphasis on digitalisation (forestry industry 4.0) and digital tools (social media, platforms, e-learning) for training and coaching, enabling practitioners to share know-how with much wider impact. The focus on ICT addresses the two main challenges in wood mobilisation: 1) better access to resources through defragmentation of forest owners and 2) increased volume to the market and higher transparency. The project’s extensive dissemination of best practices, technological and non-technological innovations and research results feeds directly into national and regional Agriculture Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) in forestry and builds an efficient interface with the EIP-AGRI and the EIP Raw Materials, supported by the European networks EFI and InnovaWood. The multi-actor action closes knowledge gaps, connects and transfers tangible knowledge and best practice between forestry practitioners across the whole Europe. In an open innovation environment, the coordination of Regional Hubs facilitates also new opportunities for exploitation of near to market innovations and fosters business partnerships between stakeholders, aligned with local and regional development plans, to complement existing or initiate new Operational Groups within the EIP-AGRI. ROSEWOOD4.0 will contribute to enhanced competitiveness of the forest industry and to vital development in rural areas within the European Bioeconomy by responding to the imminent need for broader sharing of ICT-driven solutions in forestry.