IT solutions/tools can make urban services more efficient, sustainable and user-friendly. The citizens from these areas would need to fully understand how these tools work, and what the benefits are to profit from them. An ambitious EU-funded project has sought to achieve this by developing citizen-focused tools and supporting the next generation of smart city innovators.
There are many factors that can influence a building's energy performance that a simulation cannot take into account. This is why one EU-funded project has gathered experience-based input from other building and energy stakeholders on what worked - and what didn't. The result is enbuibench, a platform where users can compare a building's energy use against other buildings with similar characteristics.
Crowded cities aren't exactly optimal environments for plants to thrive. However, a team of EU-funded researchers is using robotics to help plants automatically grow into the unnatural shapes, sizes, and configurations that urban environments demand. As a result, cities could soon benefit from a robust green infrastructure used for everything from food production to climate control.
For years, environmental scientists across different disciplines have struggled with the same technical challenges. In response, EU-funded researchers have created a community where scientists can pool their resources to find joint solutions to common problems.
The EU project CD-LINKS has helped to join the dots between climate change mitigation and sustainable development policies by creating a network of research experts in a wide range of relevant topics across the globe.
EU-funded researchers have designed a standard instrument module to monitor conditions in the deep sea. As part of a Europe-wide marine-sensing infrastructure, the modules will supply reliable long-term data on the state of our seas and oceans.
The ocean plays a vital role in our lives, both environmentally and economically. In order to protect this precious resource, EU-funded research is helping to deepen our understanding of the interlinking factors impacting Europe's coastal waters.
Plug-and-play smart cities? An open source platform jointly developed by Japanese and EU-funded researchers is facilitating the deployment of smart city technologies in urban centres worldwide to tackle urban challenges ranging from air quality and energy use to traffic congestion and infrastructure upkeep.
Amid an urgent need to cut carbon emissions to combat climate change, EU-funded researchers have developed a new generation of highly efficient power plants for generating heat and electricity from biomass.
The global bioeconomy is growing, but it must overcome hurdles including avoiding competition with land used for food production. An EU- and industry-funded project is exploring using contaminated and waste land for biocrops.
