The Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership’s third joint transnational call

Priority Area:

The third Joint Co-funded Call within the Partnership is entitled “Digitalisation and Innovation for Resilient Marine Ecosystems, Businesses, and Communities to Strengthen the EU Blue Economy Competitiveness” and encompasses all the five Intervention Areas converted for this call into five priority areas as follows:

- Priority area 1: Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTOs) at sub-basin scale

Under this priority area, projects will contribute to improve the ocean knowledge through the digitalisation of the ocean in the framework of the new approach for a sustainable blue economy in the EU (COM(2021)249 final). Projects funded under the Partnership will specifically focus upon the development, validation, or use of digital twin Ocean applications on spatially limited areas, at local scale, within the EU sub-sea-basins covered by the Partnership.

- Priority area 2: Transitioning the blue economy sectors, and the development of the coexistence and the marine multi-use infrastructures

The following targeted research directions, to be considered in the proposal formulation, are presented hereafter. A project needs to address one or more of the following topics including a multi-actor approach.

• Innovations to boost the transition of the Blue Economy

• Innovations to improve co-existence and multi-use offshore infrastructures

- Priority area 3: Climate-Smart Planning and managing sea-uses at the regional level

• Scientific knowledge, data and innovations for effective management and conservation of complex socioecological systems

• Development of innovative Decision Support Tools (DSTs)

- Priority area 4: Blue Bioresources; sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, and new bio-based products

• Innovative technologies and practices for sustainable fisheries and harvesting

• Innovations and diversification for sustainable aquaculture

• Innovations for a circular blue bioeconomy and new sustainable and high value bio-based products

- Priority area 5: Resilient Coastal Communities and Businesses

• Knowledge and Innovations to foster coastal businesses/communities resilience and sustainable coastal tourism

• Resilient coastal infrastructures and nature-based solutions

Each of these areas contributes directly to one or more of the Ocean Decade Challenges, supporting actionable knowledge generation, policy uptake, capacity development, and inclusive innovation in the blue economy context.

Impact of the proposals:

The ambition of the Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership is to support impact-driven R&I projects and to create significant societal and environmental impacts, contributing also to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030).

In line with this perspective, it is requested from the applicants to include an Impact plan in their proposal.

This Impact plan should describe what impact the research is expected to achieve in the long run and how it contributes to the overall impacts defined for the call:

• the potential for impact beyond the academic world, such as in societal, technical, environmental, economic, policy-making, or behavioural realms;

• how quadruple-helix stakeholders can be involved in, and/or benefit from, the design and achievement of the research project;

• to what extent the project promotes the uptake of research findings into decision making processes and policy-making;

• how approaches for achieving impact are integrated into the research design and conducted by the consortium.