ENV

SYNER-G is research project which has the following main goals: (1) To elaborate appropriate, in the European context, fragility relationships for the vulnerability analysis and loss estimation of all elements at risk, for buildings, building aggregates, utility networks (water, waste water, energy, gas), transportation systems (road, railways, harbors) as well as complex medical care facilities (hospitals) and fire-fighting systems. (2) To develop social and economic vulnerability relationships for quantifying the impact of earthquakes.

Fire regimes result from interactions between climate, land-use and land-cover (LULC), and socioeconomic factors, among other. These changed during the last decades, particularly around the Mediterranean. Our understanding of how they affected fire regime in the past is limited. During this century temperatures, drought and heat waves will very likely increase, and rainfall decrease. These and further socioeconomic change will affect LULC. Additional areas will be abandoned due to being unsuitable for agriculture or other uses.

The main aim of FoResTTraC is to prepare future coordinated research plans, via a strategic research roadmap, between Europe and North America regarding adaptation of forest trees to climate changes, linking different disciplines: ecology, genetics, genomics and evolution.

Coastal areas are vital economic hubs in terms of settlement, industry, agriculture, trade and tourism to mention some key sectors. There are already many coastal problems including erosion, flood risk and long-term habitat deterioration. As economies continue to develop the asset base at risk will grow, while accelerating climate change will increase the likelihood of damaging extreme events, as well as accelerate habitat decline.
Existing coastal management and defence approaches are not well tuned to these challenges as they assume a static situation.

SoilTrEC proposes to develop an integrated model of soil processes that describes key soil functions. These functions are defined in the EC Soil Thematic Strategy as essential ecosystem services for the well-being and economic success of the EU. The key science advances are to develop, from first-principles, computational models that integrate soil erosion, solute transport, carbon dynamics and food web dynamics within an open-source modelling framework.

EuroGEOSS demonstrates the added value to the scientific community and society of making existing systems and applications interoperable and used within the GEOSS and INSPIRE frameworks.

This proposal puts forward plans to establish a research network of experts on noise and health in Europe. This network will establish future research directions and policy needs in Europe. The network will review the existing literature on environmental noise exposure and health focussing on the consolidation of existing state of the art knowledge and the identification of gaps in the evidence and future research needs and hypotheses to be tested. In the network we will train junior researchers in noise and health through setting up an exchange network across Europe.

The concept of the project is based on the development of innovative nanostructured UV-Visible photocatalysts for water treatment and detoxification by using doped TiO2 nanomaterials with visible light response. The project aims at an efficient and viable water detoxification technology exploiting solar energy and recent advances in nano-engineered titania photocatalysts and nanofiltration membranes for the destruction of extremely hazardous compounds in water.

Results from clinical studies are an essential factor determining clinical decision making. It is therefore important that the results of all studies are presented in an unbiased and easily accessible manner. Health professionals and policymakers should make healthcare decisions based on the entire relevant research evidence, not on partial or skewed evidence. This, however, can frequently not be achieved, to a large part because a considerable amount of research findings are not published; this phenomenon is called publication bias.

The main goal of PROSUITE is to develop a framework methodology, operational methods and tools for the sustainability assessment of current and future technologies over their life cycle, applicable to different stages of maturity. The project will apply the methodology for four technology cases with close consultation of the stakeholders involved, which includes cases from biorefineries, nanotechnology, information technologies, and carbon storage and sequestration.