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Reconciling Adaptation, Mitigation and Sustainable Development for Cities (RAMSES)

Objective: The RAMSES project will develop a rigorous, analytical framework for the implementation of adaptation strategies and measures in EU and international cities. It will develop a set of innovative methods and tools that will quantify the impacts of climate change and the costs and benefits of adaptation to climate change and thus provide the evidence to enable policy makers to design adaptation strategies. It integrates the assessment of impacts and costs to provide a much more coherent approach than currently exists. As major centres of population, economic importance, greenhouse gas emissions and infrastructure, RAMSES focuses on adaptation issues in cities. RAMSES will deliver: 1. A strategic frame for evidence-based adaptation decision-making. A pragmatic and standardised framework for decision making using comparable climate change impact assumptions, impact and adaptation costs while taking account of uncertainty. This will apply and combine smart and unconventional scientific methodologies. 2. Multi-level analysis as local administrative units, cities will be used to develop adaptation (and more generally sustainable development) strategies from the bottom-up/top-down, that can be aggregated to consider costs at the national, EU and international levels. 3. Quantification of adaptation costs a framework for assessment of full economic costs and benefits of adaptation (to date a woefully under-researched area). 4. Policy relevance and acceptance of adaptation measures city case studies and stakeholder engagement will ensure the relevance of the framework for policy makers and ensure adaptation measures become better accepted by other stakeholders. The frameworks will be converted into a user-friendly guide for stakeholders who need to prioritize adaptation and mitigation decisions. This reduces costs and enhances understanding and acceptance of adaptation. The data will be fed into the European Clearinghouse Mechanism to increase transparency/stakeholder access.

Operationalisation of Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services: From Concepts to Real-World Applications (OPENNESS)

Objective: Despite improved understanding of the links between ecosystem health, provision of ecosystem services and human well-being, further conceptual and empirical work is needed to make the ideas of ecosystem services (ESS) and natural capital (NC) operational. OpenNESS will therefore develop innovative and practical ways of applying them in land, water and urban management: it will identify how, where and when the concepts can most effectively be applied to solve problems. To do this, it will work with public and private decision makers and stakeholders to better understand the range of policy and management problems faced in different case study contexts (ranging across locales, sectors, scales and time). OpenNESS will consolidate, refine and develop a range of spatially-explicit methods to identify, quantify and value ecosystem services, and will develop hybrid assessment methods. It will also explore the effectiveness of financial and governance mechanisms, such as payments for ecosystem services, habitat banking, biodiversity offsetting and land and ecosystem accounting. These types of interventions have potential for sustaining ESS and NC, and for the design of new economic and social investment opportunities. Finally, OpenNESS will assess how current regulatory frameworks and other institutional factors at EU and national levels enable or constrain consideration of ESS and NC, and identify the implications for issues related to well-being, governance and competitiveness. OpenNESS will analyse the knowledge that is needed to define ESS and NC in the legal, administrative and political contexts that are relevant to the EU. The work will deliver a menu of multi-scale solutions to be used in real life situations by stakeholders, practitioners, and decision makers in public and business organizations, by providing new frameworks, data-sets, methods and tools that are fit-for-purpose and sensitive to the plurality of decision-making contexts.

Innovative Hydrometallurgical Processes to recover Metals from WEEE including lamps and batteries - Demonstration (HYDROWEEE DEMO)

Objective: The recycling business is traditionally dominated by SMEs. In the last 5 years a general trend in the electronics recycling sector to bigger companies is very visible. Multinational, multi-sector companies are buying several smaller recyclers every year. Hence the previous project HydroWEEE (03/200902/2012) dealt with the recovery of rare and precious metals from WEEE. The idea has been to develop a mobile plant using hydrometallurgical processes to extract metals like yttrium, indium, lithium, cobalt, zinc, copper, gold, silver, nickel, lead, tin in a high purity. By making this plant mobile several SMEs can benefit from the same plant. By making the processes universal several fractions (lamps, CRTs, LCDs, printed circuit boards and Li-batteries) can be treated in the same mobile plant in batches. This reduces the minimum quantities and necessary investments. In addition these innovative HydroWEEE processes produce pure enough materials that can be directly used for electroplating and other applications. The objective of HydroWEEE Demo is to build 2 industrial, real-life demonstration plants (1 stationary and 1 mobile) in order to test the performance and prove the viability of the processes from an integrated point of view (technical, economical, operational, social) including the assessment of its risks (incl. health) and benefits to the society and the environment as well as remove the barriers for a wide market uptake. Finally the previously developed processes of extracting yttrium, indium, lithium, cobalt, zinc, copper, gold, silver, nickel, lead, tin will be improved and new processes to recover additional metals which are still in this fractions (Cerium, Platinum, Palladium, Europium, Lanthanum, Terbium, ) as well as the integrated treatment of solid and liquid wastes will be developed. Summarized HydroWEEE Demo will boost European competitiveness by applying novel processes for improved resource efficiency by extracting rare and precious metals.

Seasonal-to-decadal climate Prediction for the improvement of European Climate Services (SPECS)

Objective: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) sponsored the Global Framework on Climate Services (GFCS) where the need for actionable climate information for periods from several months up to several years for economic, industrial and political planning has been expressed. However, progress in seasonal forecasting has been slow and decadal forecasting is still incipient. At the same time, new model components to address the role of sea ice, land surface, stratosphere, ocean and their resolution in global models are now available from the climate change and weather forecasting communities. Methods for sophisticated downscaling and calibration for local, reliable climate predictions are scarce in Europe. In this context, SPECS aims to identify the main problems in climate prediction and investigate a battery of solutions from a seamless perspective. SPECS will undertake research and dissemination activities to deliver a new generation of European climate forecast systems, with improved forecast quality and efficient regionalisation tools to produce reliable, local climate information over land at seasonal-to-decadal time scales, and provide an enhanced communication protocol and services to satisfy the climate information needs of a wide range of public and private stakeholders.

Knowledge Based Climate Mitigation Systems for a Low Carbon Economy (COMPLEX)

Objective: The science of complex systems distinguishes linear from non-linear dynamics. Simpler systems can often be satisfactory described by linear models, but complex systems require non-linear models that can capture more of the characteristics of such systems, such as thresholds, feedback loops, avalanche effects, and irreversibility. Linear systems can be validated by aligning models to the past and using the model to predict the future. Non-linear systems, however, are often time-asymmetric - they can be explained with the wisdom of hindsight, but are not always predictable. For example, systems may respond sharply to minor perturbations, and the quality of this response is a measure of the system resilience. In practice, non-linear dynamics are significant both at the micro-scale of small history and at the macro-scale of deep time. The brilliant young scientist, for example, may experience a series of epiphanies that change his/her understanding and behaviour in an unpredictable and irreversible way. The scientific community as a whole may experience an innovation-cascade that has a similar effect on a much larger scale. Current models of climate change and carbon emission assume the immediate past is a reasonable guide to the future. They struggle to represent the complex causal structures and time-asymmetries of many socio-natural systems. COMPLEX will integrate the quasi-classic models of meso-scale processes with our best understanding of fine-grained space-time patterns and the system-flips that are likely to occur in the long interval between now and 2050. We believe the sub-national region is the key point of entry for studying climate change and its cause-effect interrelations. It is small enough to be sensitive to local factors, large enough to interact with supra-national agencies and stable enough to be historically and culturally distinctive. In addition to undertaking case studies in Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain and Italy, We will develop a suite of modelling tools and decision-support systems to inform national and supra-national policy and support communities across Europe working to make the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Politikoptionen für eine ressourceneffiziente Wirtschaft

Objective: The project will construct a theoretical framework for the analysis of resource efficiency, with detailed comparison of the trends and policies at EU and Member State (MS) level, cross-country econometric analysis to derive resource-reduction cost curves, and an analysis of business barriers to resource efficiency; thereby developing an enhanced understanding of the drivers of inefficient resource use. This will lead to an exploration of new concepts and paradigms that can bring about a radical increase in resource efficiency, and a vision for a resource-efficient economy in the EU, with suggestions also for new more resource-efficient business models for firms, and ideas for a global governance regime that can promote resource-efficient economies among the EU's trading partners and more widely will be explored. From its new vision for a resource-efficient Europe, the project will propose new policy mixes, business models and mechanisms of global governance through which resource-efficient economies may be promoted. This will lead in turn to intensive work on creating, modelling and visualising scenarios for the emergence of resource-efficient economies, through linking quantitative economic and ecological models, and simulating the policies and policy mixes derived in the earlier work, supplemented with appropriate LCA analysis for selected products and sectors, to ensure that the policies and business models in the scenarios lead to adequate absolute decoupling of economic activity from resource use and environmental degradation. The scenarios and associated policy analysis will be given an integrated interpretation across economic, ecological and social dimensions. The project will be explicitly geared to support policy efforts and initiatives on resource efficiency in the European Commission, and will involve a wide range of stakeholders from business, the policy world, and NGOs. The results will be widely disseminated in a variety of innovative ways.

New Directions in Seismic Hazard assessment through Focused Earth Observation in the Marmara Supersite (MARSITE)

Objective: The recent devastating earthquakes and associated tsunamis in Japan, Indonesia, and Haiti, which killed more than half a million people, highlighted how mankind is still far away from a satisfactory level of seismic risk mitigation. Among the regions around the Mediterranean Sea for which earthquakes represent a major threat to their social and economic development, the area around the Marmara Sea, one of the most densely populated parts of Europe, is subjected to a high level of seismic hazard. For this region the MARSITE project is proposed with the aim of assessing the state of the art of seismic risk evaluation and management at European level. This will be the starting point to move a step forward towards new concepts of risk mitigation and management by long-term monitoring activities carried out both on land and at sea. The MARSITE project aims to coordinate research groups with different scientific skills (from seismology to engineering to gas geochemistry) in a comprehensive monitoring activity developed both in the Marmara Sea and in the surrounding urban and country areas. The project plans to coordinate initiatives to collect multidisciplinary data, to be shared, interpreted and merged in consistent theoretical and practical models suitable for the implementation of good practices to move the necessary information to the end users.

The Virtual Tank Utility in Europe (VIRTUE)

Objective: VIRTUE is an Integrated Project in response to the call on Virtual environment for an integrated fluid dynamic analysis in ship design; Objective 2 Advanced design and production techniques in the Sustainable Surface Transport of the workprogramme Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems. It constitutes an EU-wide initiative of leading marine CFD players to create a 'Virtual Basin' by integrating advanced numerical fluid analysis tools to tackle multi-criteria hydrodynamic performance optimisation of ships in a comprehensive and holistic approach, aiming to complement model testing in real basins and hence substantially enhance the provision of current services to the marine industry and to nurture development of innovative design techniques and concepts. This coherent and all-embracing hydrodynamic analysis system will help increase the competitiveness of the EU shipbuilding and shipping industries, promote a truly European co-operation with strong structuring and integration effects, strengthen SMEs through involvement in leading edge developments as a means to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage and leadership and enhance quality and safety in waterborne transportation. VIRTUE's scientific and technological objectives to achieve these ambitious goals include to: -improve hydrodynamic testing through improved reliability of CFD tools -Enhance existing CFD tools in terms of performance and accuracy and further validation -Formally integrate numerical tools, using proven approaches, into an environment for complete modelling and simulation of ship behaviour at sea- Provide smooth and versatile communication and data exchange link between marine CFD service providers, such as model basins, and the end user -Provide the means - CFD tools, integration platform and optimisation techniques -to cover the whole range of hydrodynamic problems and to facilitate and support multi-disciplinary design

Development and validation of technical and economic feasibility of a multi MW Wave Dragon offshore wave energy converter (WAVE DRAGON MW)

Objective: The Wave Dragon is a slack-moored wave energy converter of the overtopping type. It is by far the most powerful wave energy converter and at the same time one of the most energy efficient and economic devices under development today. Since March 2003 a 20kW scale 1:4.5 prototype of a 7MW Wave Dragon has been tested as the world's first floating grid connected wave energy converter. The project will develop the Wave Dragon technology further from the tested all steel-built 20kW prototype to a full size composite built 7MW unit and by testing validate the technical and economic feasibility. The RTD-part of the project will: - Develop Wave Dragon's energy absorbing structure, the low head turbine power take-off system and the control systems. An additional reservoir placed above the existing reservoir level will also be developed. The result of these changes to the overall design will be a significant increase in power production and a reduction in O&M cost. The development of the 7MW unit will be based on the knowledge base established through the tests with the 20kW prototype and the design process will comprise several innovative elements utilizing the O&M experience from the 20kW prototype tests. - Develop cost effective construction methods and establish the optimal combination of in situ cast concrete, post- stressed reinforcement and pre-stressed concrete elements - Develop new supplementary environmental friendly water hydraulic power take-off systems - Demonstrate reliable and cost effective installation procedures and O&M schemes - Establish the necessary basis for design codes and recommendations for floating multi MW wave energy converters. The test program will demonstrate the availability, power production predictability, power production capability and medium to long term electricity generation costs at 0.052EUR/kWh in a wave climate of 24kW/m, which could be found relatively close to the cost at the major part of the Atlantic coast.

Choosing Efficient Combinations of Policy Instruments for Low-carbon development and Innovation to Achieve Europe's 2050 climate targets (CECILIA2050)

Objective: Europe needs to transform itself to a low-carbon economy by mid-century. The existing instrument mix needs to be scaled up drastically to initiate the changes needed across the economy. As the scale and scope of instruments increases, their interaction becomes more important, as do constraints on the political, legal and administrative feasibility. To evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness, instruments cannot be viewed in isolation; understanding and managing their interaction becomes key. The CECILIA2050 project analyses the performance of existing climate policy instruments and their interaction, and maps pathways for the evolution of the instrument mix in Europe. It describes ways to improve the economic efficiency and environmental effectiveness of the instrument mix, and to address constraints that limit their performance or feasibility. These include public acceptance, availability of finance and the physical infrastructure, but also the administrative and legal framework. The first, backward-looking part of the project takes stock of the existing instrument mix in the EU and its Member States, and assesses their coherence and past performance. It describes which factors determine their efficiency and effectiveness, and measures their effects on equity, innovation and competitiveness. The second, forward-looking part maps pathways towards a more ambitious policy mix for 2030 and 2050, starting from the current EU climate policy. With economic instruments at the heart of the mix, it describes and models how the instrumentation could evolve, based on scenarios of the magnitude of change required for the low-carbon transformation. To this end, it combines the state of the art modelling tools with qualitative and participatory methods. To complement the EU-level analysis, the effects of EU climate policies are quantified at the global level. To ensure policy relevance and mobilise practitioners knowledge, the project engages with stakeholders in different way.

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