The interest of Europeans in alternative proteins is becoming clear and this trend is the perfect ground for the dietary shift towards sustainable and healthy nutrition and food systems, in line with the ambitions of the EU Green Deal, Farm to Fork strategy and EU’s climate goals. Yet, this interest is not reflected in the European dietary patterns, as alternative proteins are mainly consumed by early adopters, while the majority is less receptive towards alternatives or have limited possibilities to integrate them in the diets. This gap between interest and consumption is due to obstacles in the food environments such as product limited offering, suboptimal product taste, isolated product placement in shops or menus etc. Without overcoming these obstacles, alternative proteins will remain a niche. LIKE-A-PRO aims at mainstreaming alternative proteins, making them accessible, available, and acceptable to everybody (from children to elderly, vulnerable groups) and everywhere (across Europe, in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas). To achieve this, key representatives along the entire alternative protein value chain (growers, producers, cooks, retailers, consumers, researchers) will work together in a trans-disciplinary consortium. To improve European food environments towards fostering alternative protein consumption, practical solutions will be co-designed with citizens. This social innovation will take place in 11 living labs and in 4 real life food environments. For a diversified alternative protein offering, 16 new alternative protein products will be developed with 7 sustainable, healthy, and novel sources. To secure result deployment, the project will actively involve middle food system actors (+35,000 companies) – via co-creation and capacity building. For a maximised impact, innovative communication campaigns will be launched in 5 countries, reaching 8 M citizens in 4 years.

For decades communication systems have been developed independently to radar systems, leading to a duplication of systems and devices that exploit the electromagnetic spectrum in common ways. Yet, the future wireless infrastructure will need to do more than just communications to support smart cities, intelligent mobility, infrastructure monitoring, security. It will need to perform multiple functions and will rely on high-reliability communication and sensing. The independent growth of radar and communication systems is no longer sustainable and will lead to a congestion of devises, emitters and sensors. There is a skills gap in the community to address this as communication engineers work isolated to radar engineers, and a new set of skills need to be developed. ISLANDS is a doctoral network that focuses on the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of integrated sensing and communication for the automotive sector, with the objective of developing new physical-layer and network-level solutions, to explore the fundamental limits of such technology, and to provide experimental validation and testing for the developed techniques. Specifically, ISLANDS will: 1) develop new transceiver algorithms, capable of integrating and leveraging the communication and sensing functionalities, with the purpose of achieving superior performance and energy and hardware efficiency; 2) investigate the ultimate network performance limits that the integration of communication and sensing can achieve in environments with extreme mobility; and 3) provide experimental validations of the developed techniques with proof-of-concept testbeds and realistic system-level simulators. ISLANDS will train the next generation of EU experts and leaders with specific interdisciplinary expertise, combining sensing and communications, with the aim of reinforcing European leadership in the automotive sector of the next decades.

The current food system is unsustainable and underperforming, having high environmental and socio-economic costs, while still failing to ensure food and nutrition equity for all. Dietary shifts towards novel foods based on alternative protein sources (NFAP; proteins derived from insect, fungi, bacteria, micro and macro algae and agriculture and aquaculture by-products), provide a unique opportunity to reduce consumption of animal-based proteins potentially minimizing the impact of the Food Systems. However, knowledge regarding the environmental, economic and social impact of the widespread production, provision and consumption of NFAP is very limited and not integrated into a holistic vision of the food system able to identify trade-offs, interaction between food system actors and second and third order impacts. The goal of EPIC-SHIFT is to provide an unprecedented, independent, solid knowledge base on the sustainability (env., eco. and soc.) aspects of NFAP as options for protein diversification for human consumption. Considering that the contribution of each NFAP types to reorganize the food systems may differ, EPIC-SHIFT applies a quadruple helix innovation model in its multi-actor approach to roadmap the sustainable development of NFAP for Planetary Health Diets. Designed as a think-tank and adopting Food Systems Thinking approach, EPIC-SHIFT will provide a multidimensional impact assessment of 7 NFAP (from protein type to product level) at scale complemented with the necessary recommendations for food environments, marketing, regulatory approval, infrastructure and investment needed to support long-term market growth. EPIC-SHIFT integrated scenario analysis will further result in decision support tools that will inform policy and decision-making about the trajectories to achieve the sustainable integration of NFAP in the EU diets ensuring resource efficiency, food security and nutrition within a framework of just transition for all food system actors.

Tourism and hospitality (T&H) make up over 10% of the European economy and 11.7% of employment. Many of the 13 million employees in the EU are from marginalised groups: women (54%), migrants (16% ) and youth (30%) (ILO, 2022). However, staff turnover and vacancies are high, with 1.2 million job vacancies (11%) in the EU. Many T&H workers are in non-standard forms of work, including platform work. This is detrimental for employees: a decent work deficit, lack of social protection, increased precarity and vulnerability, and increased in-work poverty (European Parliament 2021). Furthermore, algorithmic management impacts negatively on these workers. Generally considered as self-employed, platform workers risk exploitation, forced labour, mistreatment, and sexual abuse. Their precarity is increased due to legal, knowledge and financial obstacles they face in representation and social dialogue structures. FUTOURWORK will investigate how all T&H workers can be included in social dialogue, and understand and tackle the challenges of the associated distributional costs. While acknowledging a variety of social dialogue arrangements and processes, reflecting different historical, economic and sociopolitical backgrounds, this project researches the changes in the new world of work, examples of best practice and identifies common issues that can be tackled at a European level. Using an intersectional gender-sensitive approach FUTOURWORK will use quantitative and qualitative techniques including surveys, mapping, interviews, story -telling and multi-stakeholder learning dialogues. FUTOURWORK will produce an index that can be used by industry to benchmark their workers well-being. Workers stories will be collected and a documentary produced to enhance public understanding. We will develop an observatory to integrate the information produced and as a platform for dialogue for workers, legal and social dialogue organisations and employers.