Impactful knowledge generation and utilisation, aiming at addressing environmental and sustainability challenges, requires meaningful interaction between scientists, stakeholders, policymakers and society. This study identifies key success factors and challenges at the science-policy-practice interaction, drawing on document analysis, interviews, and workshops involving experts, policymakers, and funders of environmental and sustainability research and innovation across 14 European countries. Experiences from current practices highlight the highly variable contexts for interaction and communication throughout Europe, a diverse range of tools and approaches, and differing levels of available resources. Siloed structures and the need to engage various societal sectors and levels of governance remain significant challenges. The development and employment of expertise in communication, interaction and knowledge co-creation, capable to orchestrate this variability, is essential. Greater recognition of the diverse dimensions of inclusive participation is proposed to ensure that environmental and sustainability research and innovation, aimed at societal transformation, leaves no one behind. © 2026 Lyytimäki J et al.
The Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action CASRI – Collaborative Action coordinating and enhancing systemic, actionable and transversal Sustainability Research and Innovation – aims to strengthen the role of Environmental Protection Agencies (EPAs) in the European Research Area (ERA). Together with key partners and stakeholder, CASRI fosters a more integrated, strategic, and practice-oriented research and innovation (R&I) agenda for Europe’s sustainability transitions.
This report synthesizes and evaluates suggestions for environmental and sustainability R&I priori-ties, collected across 14 European national and regional contexts by the CASRI project. The aim is to identify relevant themes and potential key issues that address systemic, actionable, and transver-sal knowledge needs, taking into account societal relevance, the ability to contribute to grand chal-lenges, and future responsiveness.
The CASRI project gathered expert views on knowledge needs and gaps, focusing on four prede-fined themes of environmental and sustainability R&I, and also welcoming new perspectives.
In total, over 600 individual proposals for priorities were collected. This report analyses the stated demands and identifies key issues relevant beyond individual countries or stakeholder groups. Based on content analysis, key issues were formulated and sorted using the guiding principles of CASRI. This initial selection was further discussed and validated in an international expert workshop involving 60 participants of 47 different organisations.
The following aspects relevant to the future CASRI R&I agenda are emphasized under the four CASRI predefined themes that organised the data collection:
• “Resilient, net-zero, circular production systems”: This theme presents a broad range of knowledge needs with a greater emphasis on traditional (mission-oriented) R&I objectives, particularly focused on industrial ecosystems and innovation. Broader, public-oriented inno-vation needs are also significant and tend to focus on wider societal change, generally ori-ented towards equity and actor influence. Security of resource supply appears as an over-arching concern.
• “Biodiversity and climate”: Although both areas are already well-established in science and policy, specific attention should be given to their intersectionality and scaling up. Key issues include data utilization, the governance of climate–biodiversity interactions, and the regula-tory and institutional frameworks for policy implementation. Ecological restoration and the resilience of soil, water, and forest ecosystems are also central concerns.
• “Sustainable urbanisation”: This theme encompasses solutions to environmental and sus-tainability challenges in urban areas. It involves the integrated strategic coordination of di-verse actors and sectoral knowledge, adequate resources, and land-use and legal planning processes to pursue shared goals of climate adaptation, environmental resilience, and social justice.
• “Nature- and environmentally friendly energy transition”: While the energy transition requires technological innovation, also transdisciplinary research and transformative action are needed. This includes social justice dimensions, as well as aspects of governance, social acceptance, environmental effects of energy infrastructure, land use, and scenario comparisons. Overall, there is a need for active social engagement to effectively balance ecological, economic, and social challenges.
Several priorities were also presented outside or cross-cutting these four predefined themes. Key issues identified beyond these original themes included integrative assessments of trade-offs, syn-ergies, and risks, thereby emphasizing preparedness; the management of geopolitical and other conflicts; environmental and ecosystem health; the potential for scaling up experiments; and inno-vation diffusion. The need for policy-relevant understanding of transformative change and the role of the social sciences was also emphasized. Additionally, the reconfiguration of the economic system—highlighting overconsumption of natural resources, sufficiency, and justice—was brought forward.
Overall, this report provides a comprehensive synthesis of shared transnational environmental and sustainability key issues. Simultaneously, it contextualises these key issues within the framework of current public priorities, such as security, democracy and participation, regulatory efficiency and competitiveness, and digitalisation. Consequently, it delivers the analytical foundation for selecting issues with strategic potential for European transnational collaboration. The findings will significantly inform the development of the CASRI Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda.
Quelle: Bericht
The responses of populations and communities to environmental change, including eutrophication, biodiversity loss, and invasive species, are in large part determined by the network and strength of interactions among species, such as one species consuming another. Strong interactions between species lead effects to propagate strongly through a community, similar to the spread of ripples caused by a pebble thrown into a pond. Weak interactions, in contrast, cause slower and dampened spread of effects across the populations in a community. We must know and measure the strength of these interactions among species if we are to predict the ecological consequences of environmental change. There is, however, lack of clarity about the best ways to measure interactions. Our primary aim is to make a comparison of methods for quantifying interactions and predicting community dynamics. Laboratory based microbial ecosystems are ideal for this research, due to their fast dynamics and their ease of manipulation. Interactions estimated in these model ecosystems will be used in dynamical models, which will make predictions about the effects of two novel perturbations: extinction and eutrophication. Comparison of the actual outcome of the perturbations with the model predictions, both at the level of individual species, and the whole community, will provide urgently required answers about how to measure interactions in order to predict community dynamics in changing environments. The research will also contribute to the methodology for measuring interactions in microbial communities. Finally, it will provide a young scientist with a challenging and productive research project, involving training in a range of ecological research methods.