Funds are available to finance energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. Many islands are engaged in energy transition; however most of them haven’t the expertise to concretely launch investments, access finance and kick start the projects. NESOI aims at filling this gap through a hands-on approach allowing to get the expected financial leverage towards the effective implementation of islands’ energy transition plans. Starting with a broad survey gathering EU islands’ needs, NESOI provides a platform where islands can access both indirect and direct support: 1) Provided through a tailor-made digital platform, the indirect support consists in training material, best case examples, toolkit for technical and economic best practices and a cooperative space for islands, investors and technology developers; 2) Based on transparent technical, social, economic and environmental criteria, NESOI selects projects for customised direct support from consortium experts and from external ones for local aspects thanks to a cascade mechanism. NESOI supports projects at different stages of development, starting from early stage ones requiring a high-level technical & economic assistance, to more advanced ones asking for specific and detailed contributions on various fields (technical, legal, financial), putting forward a reality-check mindset, to make islands focus on solid projects with the potential to attract investors. NESOI implements capacity building and coaching activities to ensure raising awareness and capacity of public authorities' staff for developing investible projects with the aim to empower Local Communities in a success pursuit of the energy transition. Broad communication activities at EU level and links with other initiatives like BRIDGE and the Cities Facility are also foreseen. NESOI partners are strongly connected to investors, island communities and the energy innovation ecosystem, and intend to develop a sustainable business model for NESOI platform

IANOS brings together two Lighthouse (LH) islands (Terceira-PT, Ameland-NL), and three Fellow islands (FI) (Lambedusa-IT, Bora-Bora-FR, Nisyros-GR), all sharing a common vision of decarbonizing their energy systems and be energy independent until 2050. Thirty-four (33) strongly experienced partners from nine (9) European countries, join forces to deliver smart technological, economic and social innovations, providing systemic optimization starting from an Energy Community-centric approach. IANOS adopts an Island Energy Transition Strategy built around three (3) Island Energy Transition Tracks that focus on: a) Energy efficiency and grid support for extremely high RES penetration, b) Decarbonization through electrification and support from non-emitting fuels, c) Empowering Local Energy Communities (LEC). Through IANOS an impressive repository of elements (technologies, tools, methods) will be demonstrated in the two LH islands and within nine (8) carefully defined Use-Cases (UCs) that will lead to: a reduction of fossil fuel consumption by 326.4 GWh/y, an increase in RES utilization by 26.5 GWh/y, increase accuracy of vRES forecasts by >10% and reduce energy bills of end-users by >15%. In total, 900 participants (prosumers/consumers) will be involved in LECs by the end of IANOS. Elements to be demonstrated include: an iVPP operative orchestration toolkit, smart energy routers, hybrid transformers, flywheel storage, biobased batteries, heat batteries, tidal kite, and the IANOS Energy Planning and Transition Suite (IEPT). The replication potential of IANOS UCs will be evaluated in the three FIs. Due to their current local energy mix, Terceira and Ameland can particularly act as LHs for geothermal and hydrogen-centered island economies, respectively. To reach all these goals, a total of 121.6M€ will be invested by the 2 LH ecosystems, while another 60.4M€ will be fuelled by the 6 FI ecosystems during IANOS (until 2025).

ENPOWER will design, develop and demonstrate SSH-driven methodologies, interactive and closed-loop tools, and data-driven services for energy-activated citizens and energy-secure cross-sector communities towards a citizen-centric energy system. We combine leading-edge ICTs with social/behavioural dimensions and with sharing economy and value stacking business models to deploy: 1) a Social Science Framework for energy citizens activation and innovative multi-dimensional incentives for citizens’ participation in energy markets; 2) AI-based consumers clustering and segmentation algorithms; 3) interactive tools and facilitation services for energy community planning; 4) Energy Data Space adaptation to support community-level data-driven activation and interoperable automated privacy and sovereignty-preserving Demand Response (DR); 5) P2P DLT/Blockchain digital marketplace for tokenized energy and non-energy assets reciprocal compensation; 6) data-driven services and apps for energy efficiency and activation performance management; 7) ICT services and Digital Twins for community-level energy optimization and aggregated flexibility management to trade off local self-consumption against grid service provisioning, while boosting a beyond-energy community social welfare; 8) Edge monitoring hubs for automated DR; 9) Business Sandbox for novel sharing economy and social innovation-based business models; 10) methodologies for evaluating different energy community setups, upscaling and replication. ENPOWER framework will be validated along 4 Front Runners energy communities pilots and further replicated in 2 Early Adopters, covering different levels of maturity of communities, to demonstrate increased RES local self-consumption and consumers participation to the energy markets, while nurturing increased local security of supply. ENPOWER Leadership Programme and blueprints will support EU-wide replication and advice regulatory bodies on communities-friendly enabling frameworks.

"""Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world."" ~ Nelson MandelaOut of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is the third-leading cause of death in industrialized countries. In Europe, it affects over 350,000 people annually.In an OHCA occurrence, provision of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) within the first 2-3 minutes could save 100,000 of those people. However, timely access to healthcare, which is a key principle of the European Pillar of Social Rights, is not certain, since timely CPR would have to be provided by bystanders, who would have to be properly trained laypeople, rather than Emergency Medical Technicians, not likely to be on the scene during those first critical minutes.The realistic and sustainable solution to this problem is to train a sufficiently large portion of the general population in CPR (roughly 15%). The most suitable group to receive this training are school children, whose main activity is learning, and who will readily absorb new knowledge and skills. Respectively, the optimum environment in which to provide education and training is the school environment, which offers equal access to all children, regardless of financial, social, religious, racial or ethnic background and allows them to function as multipliers. Schools also provide a steady supply of potential trainers – the teachers whose role is to educate children.In 2016, the “Kids Save Lives – ERC position statement on school children education in CPR”, which was endorsed by the World Health Organization, presented this information and suggested training school children above the age of 12 in CPR in all schools. Other research proposes the age of 10 as the minimum age for efficient CPR training, based on physical, cognitive and emotional characteristics.Project L.I.F.E.F.O.R.C.E. (Learning Initiative For Elementary school Fun Oriented Resuscitation Coaching Europewide) advocates the development of a learning methodology, educational tools and e-learning environment to pre-train pupils aged 6-10 years old in elements of CPR using innovative, learning-by-doing activities, to prepare them for proper CPR training later on. It will also cultivate the ideals of solidarity and volunteering and will promote a culture of prevention, well-being and healthy lifestyle across Europe. The project will also provide teachers with innovative non-formal teaching methods, which will not only apply to CPR training, but also to teaching other subjects, bringing added value to its outcomes.To achieve this, the project will be implemented in elementary schools in the 4 participating countries, taking into account linguistic, cultural and other particulars. It will also organize a series of events and activities to demonstrate its outputs and impact, not only to school children and teachers, but also to head teachers, parents, pedagogists, stakeholders and policy makers on local, national and European level. The project outputs and results will be thoroughly disseminated through a series of carefully planned activities, such as social and cultural events, conferences and publications, spanning long after the project’s end, to promote sustainability and to ensure that it will reach the maximum number of interested parties.The project will be implemented in five phases, as described below:1st: Overview of nursery and primary school educational systems in European countries. It will focus on the educational systems in European countries with special attention to elements that are relevant - in some capacity - with the pre-training of 6-10 year old school children in Basic Life Support and first aid.2nd: Development of methodology to convert BLS skills into suitable, innovative educational activities. This phase will identify a common ground on which to build the interdisciplinary methodology for the pre-training of 6-10 year old school children in Basic Life Support and first aid, using experiential, interactive activities, in order to promote critical thinking and enhance skill retention.3rd: Educational material for the pre-training of children. This phase will provide the educational material that will deliver the actual cognitive and behavioral skills to school children, using innovative, learning by doing activities.4th: Educational material for training the trainers. This phase involves the development of a Training the Trainers material, which will enable the trainers to effectively deliver pre-training of children.5th: Development of e-learning platform, multimedia, app to deliver the on-line learning modules.The long-term plan of the project partners is to demonstrate the effectiveness of pre-training of 6-10 year old school children in CPR and to campaign for inclusion of CPR-first aid training in the national curricula of the EU member-countries, in order to increase the number of future CPR providers and help save as many lives of OHCA victims."

Emergency Medical Services in Europe are characterised by a pluralistic landscape with diverse organisational setups, professional standards, coordination mechanisms and actors which result from different historical and institutional contexts in EU member states. However, diversity is united by the common aim, of providing timely care to victims of sudden and life-threatening injuries, emergencies or disasters within EU-member states (EUMS), in cross-border settings and international humanitarian missions. Fostering the response capacities and increasing the cooperation of the European Emergency Medical Services Systems (EMSS) is of decisive importance for strengthening the resilience of European societies in the light of multiple hazards: Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of disasters, terrorism is becoming a very real scenario for mass causality events challenging both out-of-hospital as well as in-hospital emergency care, and health related hazards are calling for close cooperation of public safety and health authorities on an international level. Not only hazards but also the system’s diversity poses a challenge for preparedness planning and cooperation, which needs to involve the whole EMS system at regional and/or national level and integrate it into the whole health system and fully coordinate with the public safety system to be effective. The iProcureSecurity project seeks to identify the major challenges the system’s diversity poses to the ability to work together, stimulate R&I uptake with a view to increasing standardisation of operations across Europe, and deliver technical requirements for R&I activities to create a European system of Medical Emergency Teams that is more homogeneous and capable to work as singly unit. To achieve this aim, the project will engage in several exchange cycles with practitioners and other stakeholders in the innovation landscape as a preparation for major R&I activities as part of a PCP action.