At EIT Urban Mobility (EIT UM), our mission is to accelerate change towards a sustainable mobility model for liveable urban spaces. All our activities serve the three societal impact goals of improving quality of life in cities, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and creating jobs that strengthen the European urban mobility sector. The Business Plan (BP) 2023-2025 is the main tool to drive forward the implementation of our Strategic Agenda 2021-2027. The activities described in this BP are oriented along three intervention areas: bringing talent to business, bringing innovations to the market, and bringing startups to scale. In line with these, this BP aims to leverage on the new partnership model introduced in 2022 which prioritises openness and accessibility of the network to reach impact goals with a strong community of over 200 active partners per year. Nine Challenge Areas stemming from city challenges are prioritized within this BP to provide topical direction and enable the highest innovation potential with maximum societal, ecological, and economic impact. In parallel to delivering on impact, we aim to boost our programme elements towards becoming financially sustainable. After testing various revenue mechanisms in 2021 and 2022, we are putting a stronger focus on equity as a substantive revenue stream. Furthermore, partnership growth will be boosted across all regions and with a focus on a steep growth of participating SMEs. Finally, alternative funding sources such as bidding for EU and national funding will be ramped up, and private sponsors for pilots will be attracted. Overall, the BP2023-2025 takes a substantial step on EIT UM’s path towards becoming a social impact investor. It fosters both – efficiency in the delivery of the Financial Sustainability strategy as well as the creation of social impact through strong efforts in implementing the EIT and KIC Impact Frameworks – and by that guides EIT UM towards achieving our mission.

The CIVITAS Initiative will be led by a new CIVITAS MUSE Coordination and Support Action from 2023-2027, coordinated by ICLEI Europe and involving 8 expert partners in total. This project will deliver a wide range of services to the European Commission and its funded urban mobility-related projects, to enhance their results through further communication, capacity building and exploitation activities. These will involve and reach all parts of the urban mobility community, particularly CIVITAS project participants and EU cities. Further dissemination of the state of the art is made possible through CIVITAS MUSE by enhancing operational structures that involve wider community stakeholders such as the Secretariat, CIVINET regional and national networks, the Policy Advisory Committee, annual Conferences, a new Collective of European mobility networks, as well as improving collaboration groups between projects and their partners (and their related stakeholders and experts), at both a management and thematic/topic based level. The CIVITAS MUSE project helps to guarantee the replication of innovative solutions and results through a deployment planning cycle, working with cities through capacity building exchanges to promote solution-specific learning and broad skills development. Monitoring, extracting and communicating the most useful results and information from projects lies at the core of CIVITAS MUSE, with projects supported in employing up to date evaluation approaches. CIVITAS MUSE comes at a key time in the Smart and Climate Neutral Cities Mission and the achievement of multiple Destination goals including those under Cross-Sectoral Solutions for the Climate Transition.

The policies driving the green and digital transitions, or twin transitions, are intended to level the field to achieve the European Growth Model and attain the EU Green Deal and the UN’s SDGs. However, these policies have had unintended and unforeseen effects, creating new inequalities and/or aggravating existing ones. Those primarily affected are social groups already at risk and EU’s most vulnerable regions. Public authorities and policy-makers at local, national and European levels therefore need evidence-based understanding of these inequalities and concrete ways to prevent and/or mitigate these. The READJUST project aims to suggest policy options for overcoming these (potential) trade-offs between efficiency and equality in twin transitions, in the key sectors of mobility and agri-food. The green and digital policies are intended to level the field for attaining SDGs; however, they may return uneven distribution of access to the transitions and their benefits. READJUST aims to suggest options for overcoming the perceived trade-off between efficiency and equality in policy and to make inclusive growth a reality. Policymakers portray a future that is green and digital for the EU, and they aim to continuously contain the unintended consequences of the green and digital transitions in terms of inequalities. Generating zero negative effects on the climate can be efficiently achievable by twining green and digital transitions. Nonetheless, individually and jointly, the transitions might widen the existing inequality gaps. This project aims to contribute to policies for fair and just twin transitions to mitigate existing inequalities driven by the twin transitions and minimize the transitions’ unintended consequences for equality. In this project, we strive to address the inequalities created or exacerbated by the twin transitions policies in certain domains. Policies of green and digital transitions which are aimed at the growth of the entirE, or its subsections.

BatteReverse aims to enable the next generation of battery reverse logistics (RL). It will develop a more efficient and universal method for battery discharge and first diagnosis for a wide range of Li-ion battery types, safety packaging with a monitoring system reducing thermal runaway risk during transportation of batteries, automated dismantling and sorting of battery components based on a safe and more efficient human-robot collaboration, and a more precise and faster Remaining Useful Life assessment of battery modules for 2nd life applications based on acoustic testing and machine learning algorithms. On top of that, BatteReverse will develop a Battery Data Space with standardised labelling and battery passport functionalities to improve battery identification. We will connect the stakeholders through a community platform and analyse the entire RL process by a digital twin (DT) simulation that will optimise profitability of RL circular business models. The innovations will be integrated and demonstrated in an operational environment in two use-cases for end-of-first-life (EoFL) EV batteries - recycling and repurposing – mirrored with the DT simulation. By 2026 we expect these developments to contribute to following outcomes: increase recycling efficiency by 5%, raise share of repurposed EoFL batteries to 10%, reduce risk of severe events in reverse logistics to 1/10.000, successfully simulate two successful RL business models and to have a stakeholder’s community platform with 50+ stakeholders. These outcomes will contribute to the sovereignty of the EU in the battery sector. By further uptake of the developed results beyond the project, BatteReverse targets to avoid the use of 3.691 tonnes/year of primary critical raw materials, on top of that avoid the deployment of 100,8 MWh capacity of new batteries yearly while capturing an extra €30,24 million/year value out of EoFL batteries and avoiding 31 severe risk events/year within the EU RL battery chain by 2029.

The TRANS-SAFE project will involve national, regional, and city level demonstrations to test different types of innovative and integrated Safe System solutions, complemented by a comprehensive toolbox, capacity development, policy support and replication activities. To maximize impact, the project brings together in a consortium, highly committed cities, road safety agencies and experts from both Europe and Africa. Building on numerous synergistic projects, networks, and a strong technical experience among partners, the consortium will deliver an ambitious project through highly effective and innovative approaches to sustainable road safety development, thereby ensuring that road safety systems and interventions from this project deliver on the recommendations of the Road Safety Cluster of the African-EU Transport Task Force, adopted in 2020. The consortium members have experience and expertise in Africa-related research as well as development-related research in collaboration with local actors in various countries of Africa at many levels. Ultimately, the project will help deliver on the Joint EU-Africa Strategy (JAES) and advance countries' progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).