Climate change poses significant threats to human health and well-being, impacting not only the EU Boreal region but also Europe as a whole. The increasing frequency and severity of extreme events, like floods, wildfires, rising sea levels, and heatwaves have far-reaching consequences for local communities. The need to adapt to climate change's impacts and embrace transformative solutions has garnered recent political attention. Nevertheless, recent extreme incidents, such as the 2021 wildfires in the Boreal region and similar events in Europe, have underscored the imperative of systemic actions and revealed the disproportionate vulnerability of already marginalized populations. The AURORA project aims to enhance resilience against health risks stemming from climate change and contribute to the overarching Mission objectives. It seeks to achieve this by developing a suite of tools capable of: 1) Monitoring climate stressors, 2) Creating climate and epidemiological models 3) Generating forecasts via simulated scenarios 4) Identifying climate change risks and vulnerabilities in the Boreal region. These risks will be complemented by a reliable AI-driven technology that will 5) Issue early warnings and recommend adaptive measures and nature-based solutions. These components will form a robust Decision Support system providing specific recommendations. The AURORA consortium, with its vast experience in research projects, envisions active engagement with stakeholders throughout all project stages via an Implementation Hub. This engagement aims to foster behavioral change and showcase the project's solutions in 5 Demo cities (Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Tampere, Pori ) and 3 replicant cities (Klaipeda, Joniskis, Jurmala). The knowledge and insights generated by AURORA will be disseminated through clustering activities, ultimately empowering local policymakers to make evidence-based decisions, reassess strategies, and develop management plans for climate-resilient cities.

The TealHelix advances the state-of-the-art by proposing a more precise and targeted approach – empowerment through personalization and inclusion. Using the underlying logic of motivational matching, we will develop a number of new labeling approaches and digital social innovations to guide and improve consumer decision-making. Such an approach will also enable us to address resistance to sustainability ideas and tailor our interventions to the heterogeneity in individual needs of vulnerable consumers. Combining insights from life cycle, social and economic environments analysis, measurement, and consumer behavior theories, we will develop a new measure to assess how individual and planetary preferences for various sustainability dimensions can be aligned to reach sustainability goals. Next, we will test a number of means of transmission: traditional labeling approaches, digital and brick-and-mortar retail labeling approaches, and smart labeling approaches. To sustain and scale the change, we will develop integrity guidelines and new sustainability information provision standards for the industry. We will leverage the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary competencies of the consortium in marketing, consumer behavior, psychology, environmental, information sciences, as well as in communication, retailing, and standard-setting industries. The project will generate multiple novel methods to study labeling approaches and original empirical evidence through machine learning-based 'big data' analysis, large-scale surveys, experience-sampling and micro-level experiments. Finally, we will integrate the findings into digital social innovations powered by AI tools to support labeling solutions. As a result, we will provide a deeper understanding of how various external environments shape attitudes and beliefs towards food sustainability labeling, how to motivate consumers to follow sustainable labeling guidelines, and how to include the ones who are in greatest need.

The proposed project explores; a) how Russia and China pursue information-suppression tactics in the EU and its partner countries (PCs) and how they construct/strategize these tactics, b) which cases of FIMI have been the most impactful in EU countries and PCs, and how to measure the importance of future FIMI 'attacks' c) which transnational dissemination and consumption networks have been contributing to the success of foreign information-suppression attempts within the EU, d) the social and psychological drivers of which forms of FIMI succeed, e) how can the existing legal, regulatory, and diplomatic frameworks in the EU (such as the GDPR or Digital Services Act) and PCs be improved to build greater resilience against such efforts, and f) opportunities and pitfalls of platform-level governance that could be improved to improve collective EU and PC defences against FIMI, in an interdisciplinary, multi-method, interconnected and multinational manner. The value of this research linkage is; (1) better understanding FIMI from the perpetrator side for more accurate defense, (2) why trans-European information networks knowingly or unknowingly (misinformation vs disinformation) adopt semantic narratives of certain FIMI attempts and contribute to their domestic and Europe-wide dissemination, (3) synoptically evaluate and methodologically sharpen existing research on cognitive and societal drivers of which topic and content types remain most salient in ‘successful’ FIMI cases, (4) approach the research gaps that exist in this field by providing an interdisciplinary focus by combining political communication, international relations, social psychology, area studies (EU, China and Russia), security studies and computational social science, and (5) present an expanded solution space by creating an interconnected menu of legal, regulatory, diplomatic and technological policy and regulatory options to help counter FIMI in a more coordinated and targeted fashion.

The DietWise advances the state-of-the-art by proposing systemic changes, a focus on inclusion, and open social innovations with the aim of developing solutions that streamline existing tools and applications to foster healthy and sustainable food provision and to make cooking, eating, and treating of food at home the most attractive choice for all stakeholders. Using disruptive new approaches and voluntary market self-regulation, our activities will help to dampen nutritional noise gradually and organically merge cultural and commercial practices with a healthier and sustainable food consumption pattern. Next, we will empower citizens with novel, citizen science-based solutions that will shift the role citizens play – away from passive actors influenced by the food environment to citizens as active participants influencing their decisions and helping to create better digital food environments. The project will generate multiple novel insights to empower citizens to make healthy and sustainable choices and original empirical evidence through 'big data' analysis, large-scale surveys, qualitative research, and micro-level experiments. From a methodological point of view, we will harness novel state of the art methods, such as using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with deep learning techniques to analyze big online data. Finally, we will integrate scientific and empirical findings into social innovations powered by AI and develop user-oriented tools to support citizens. As a result, our methodological and empirical advancements will provide a deeper understanding of how various external system-level environmental factors shape attitudes and beliefs towards healthy and sustainable food provision and cooking, how to motivate consumers to follow nutrition guidelines, how to include the ones who are in greatest need, and how to help citizens shape digital food environments.