The goal of the COASTAL project is to formulate and evaluate business solutions and policy recommendations aimed at improving the coastal-rural synergy to foster rural and coastal development while preserving the environment. Rural development in the EU is increasingly affected by changing market developments, decreasing population densities, urban sprawl, lack of employment, desertification and other environmental, economic and social pressures. On the other hand, coastal areas provide interesting business opportunities but are also influenced by economic activities in the hinterland. Multi-Actor Approaches will be combined with System Dynamics to analyse the environmental, economic, and social interactions of rural and coastal areas in a holistic manner. The underlying feedback structures governing the dynamics, vulnerabilities, limitations, and business opportunities of the land-sea system will be identified and analysed, taking into consideration the regulatory frameworks, stakeholder priorities and social-economic conditions at the local, regional and macro-regional scale levels. Multi-Actor Labs using qualitative and quantitative tools will be set up to support the co-creation exchanges between scientific experts, stakeholders, business entrepreneurs, sector- and administrative representatives. The project will be structured around six closely interacting work packages with six complementary case studies in Sweden, Belgium, France, Spain, Greece and Romania.

The impacts of climate change on people, planet and prosperity are intensifying. Many regions and communities are struggling to avoid losses and need to step up the effort to increase their climate resilience. Ongoing natural capital degradation leads to growing cost, increased vulnerability, and decreased stability of key systems. Therefore, the European Mission on Climate Adaptation acknowledges the need to adopt a systemic approach by working across sectors and disciplines, experimenting, and involving local communities. NBRACER steps up to this challenge with an innovative and practical approach to accelerate the transformation towards climate resilient regions that are safe, green, clean, healthy, and just. Adaptation will be based on the smart packaging of nature-based solutions (NBS), rooted in the resources supplied by biogeographic landscapes, and embedded in a transformative action approach that mobilizes and enables regions and communities to accelerate forward. NBRACER works with Demonstrating and Replicating regions in the European Atlantic biogeographical area to vision and co-design place based sustainable NBS that are at one with the regional landscapes, upscaling these into coherent regional packages and building time and place specific adaptation pathways integrating local solutions and regional scales. This process is supported by a regional scale effort to build adaptation journeys with community support, with input from teams testing and validating place based NBS solution portfolios situated in landscapes. Innovative technical and adaptation transformation support packages provide quantitative mapping methods and a transformative action approach and capacity building, and networking enable scaling out and building connections. Led by Deltares, advanced in climate adaptation science, the consortium builds synergy from the strength of practitioners, ecosystem engineers, innovators of transformative adaptation, finance, and capacity building experts.

The PATTERN project’s general objective is to improve practitioners’ capacity for decision making on climate and environmental policies, by developing an interactive online platform for the economic appraisal of policies and measures. To reach this general objective, the project will develop an operational integrated economic appraisal approach (WP3 and 4), deliver guidelines to bridge ex-post and ex-ante analyses (WP1), build and demonstrate an effective participatory process to create 5 Theories of Change (WP2), build a European Community of Practice for climate and environmental policymaking (WP6), and create a One-Stop-Shop for all policy and decision makers to access and use the project results easily. PATTERN will thus provide decision-makers, stakeholders, and the public with more realistic and operational ability to systematically assess their policies and their consequences. It will provide a basis for improving (i) methodologies, techniques and models for conducting economic appraisal of climate and environmental policies (ii) the broader policy evaluation framework and practices currently used in European countries and their regions and (iii) tailored analysis and engagement strategies structures for the participation and co-creation with relevant stakeholders and key actors to enhance operational capacities and improve the impact of European policies on climate and environment. Overall, results obtained from in-depth ex-post and ex-ante analysis of the PATTERN’s 5 case studies will bring new evidence on the effectiveness of various types of regulatory strategies, instruments and approaches for climate and environmental policies and insights for the design and evaluation of the implementation of major European policies.

Urgent and concerted action can stop and reverse unsustainable land use and the over-exploitation of land resources. This will however require rapid, simultaneous and coordinated action by a diversity of land use decision makers. MOSAIC aims therefore to achieve the following objectives: 1. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the motivations and drivers behind land use decisions (e.g. cultural factors, social identities, cognitive frameworks, market prices, legal frameworks, etc.), including their relative importance and interactions, within and between relevant governance levels, ranging from individual land managers to supra-national organisations. 2. To gain a thorough understanding of the awareness of key land use decision makers about climate change, biodiversity loss and renewable energy challenges, and their willingness to address these challenges. 3. To characterise future land use patterns based on spatial, social and economic models that integrate key insights into the motivations and drivers behind land use related decisions and the result of these decisions in causing displacement effects, i.e. indirect land use changes in other parts of the world. 4. To support policy design and implementation for climate change, renewable energy and biodiversity, by means of innovative cost-effective instruments and approaches co-created in policy labs contributing to and elaborating on MOSAIC’s research results in a transdisciplinary way. 5. To develop an interactive digital learning environment, embedded within a digital toolbox comprising proven technologies and approaches consistent with long-term European sustainability goals and strategies to support land use decision processes at governance levels ranging from local to supra-national scales. Interdisciplinary SSH research linked to state-of-the-art land use modelling will be core to this project, and will be embedded in a transdisciplinary research approach based on policy labs.

PLUS Change brings together 23 institutions from across Europe including 5 Universities, 5 research institutes, 3 stakeholder network organisations, 1 performing arts collective, and 9 practice partners representing regional planning and land management authorities and organisations. The objectives directly address the call with an aim to create land use strategies and decision-making processes that meet climate, biodiversity and human well-being objectives of sustainability, and to develop interventions that leverage political, economic, societal, material and cultural contexts to achieve these strategies, by involving actors at multiple decision-making levels (individual, land management, planning, policy). Activities include land use modelling (including historical and future trajectories of change), systems mapping, causal loop diagrams, performing arts approaches, randomized controlled trials of behaviour change, sociological surveys, and policy and governance reviews. All activities brought together in an integrated research design that draws on their different contributions to a holistic approach to understand multi-scale land use systems across a diversity of socioeconomic and biogeographical contexts, and create usable tools for land managers, users, planners and policy makers. The project is anchored in, and integrated through, 11 location-based cases for co-creation, and in a high-level multiplier cluster to identify challenges and impacts at EU and Global levels. Outputs include recommendations of co-designed and tested interventions to unlock behavioural, structural and procedural changes to achieve identified land use strategies; and a toolkit to support land use planners in enacting these interventions, including knowledge training, a planning dashboard and simulation tools, and methods for engaging citizens and land managers in behaviour change.