4th EU-LAC JOINT CALL in Science Technology and Innovation 2022

Network of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean Countries on Joint Innovation and Research Activities

Funding entity: 15 funding agencies from 13 different countries (Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Germany, Italy, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Uruguay)

ID: Topics

Global Challenges I – Interactions and integration between the climate science, SSH and other communities (Participating funding agencies from: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil (CONFAP), Dominican Republic, Germany, Panama, Poland, Spain AEI, Turkey, Uruguay)

Global Challenges II – Cross-cutting digital research infrastructure (Participating funding agencies from: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil CNPq and CONFAP, Dominican Republic, Germany, Panama, Spain (AEI), Turkey)

Health I – Personalised Medicine (Participating funding agencies from: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil CNPq and CONFAP, Dominican Republic, Germany, Italy, Panama, Poland, Spain AEI and ISCIII, Turkey)

Health II – EU-LAC Regional Hubs: Integrating Research infrastructures for Health and Disease (Participating funding agencies from: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil CNPq and CONFAP, Dominican Republic, Germany, Italy, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Spain AEI, Turkey, Uruguay)

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Research Infrastructures (Participating funding agencies from: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil CNPq and CONFAP, Dominican Republic, Germany, Italy, Panama, Peru, Spain AEI, Turkey)

Interoperability of energy data spaces for an optimized exploitation by producers and prosumers /

Research Infrastructures (Participating funding agencies from: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil CONFAP, Dominican Republic, Germany, Panama, Spain AEI, Turkey)

Deadline for submission: 28th April of 2022 at 16h00 (GMT)

Funding: project partners are funded in accordance with their national and regional funding regulations. The overall budget of the present Joint Call is the sum of the individual budgets allocated by each participating funding institution and is divided across call topics. Applicants should therefore thoroughly check the national and regional regulations http://eucelac-platform.eu/joint-actions and are strongly recommended to contact their National Call Contact Persons before submitting their proposal.

Funding period: up to 36 months (check national regulations). Approved projects should start between December 2022 and February 2023.

Consortium composition:

-Each consortium submitting a proposal must involve a minimum of four eligible partners from four different countries with at least two countries from each region (EU and LAC). A partnering tool is available;

-A maximum number of national partners applying for funding will be defined in the institutional rules of each funding organization;

-Partners not eligible for funding may also be part of the consortia if they are able to clearly demonstrate an added value to the consortium and secure their own funding;

-The self-financed/associated partners must provide the Call Secretariat with a signed official letter of support from their Head of Department or Financial Director;

-There should be a principal investigator (PI) for each of the national research groups. One of them will act as the Coordinator and represent the consortium, submit the proposal, and establish any further communication with the Call Secretariat.

-A Coordinator must not submit more than one proposal. However, one research institution (as a legal entity) is allowed to participate as a coordinator or partner in several project proposals.

Submission of applications: electronic platform

Project proposals must be submitted electronically using the PT Outline webtool from DLR: https://ptoutline.eu/app/eu-lac-2022. All proposals must be written in English and the only currency to be applied in the proposal is EURO.

The project proposal consists of two parts:

a) Proposal application form: Available for download at https://www.eucelac-platform.eu/joint-actions. This form has to be filled in offline by the project coordinator and uploaded at the PT Outline webtool from DLR: https://ptoutline.eu/app/eu-lac-2022 before final submission of the proposal. It contains the general project data, details on the project consortium, the project description and financial plan.
b) Online Submission Form: This form has to be filled in online by the coordinator. It consists of an overview followed by four pages, each one requiring different information (general project information, data of the project coordinator and partners, project summary). CVs, commitment letters of project partners participating with own funds, as well as letters of support can also be uploaded here, before checking and submitting the proposal.

The applicants may find it useful to check the Guidelines for Applicants, available at the following web pages: https://www.eucelac-platform.eu/joint-actions.

Geographical area of application: international

Goals and priorities:

To initiate sustainable and multilateral research cooperation between researchers from Europe, Latin-America and the Caribbean countries, by submitting transnational calls in research and innovation.

Global Challenges I

This call focuses on how the integration of Social Sciences and Humanities and climate science can contribute to three scientific priorities. First, the integration of SSH is necessary to reduce uncertainty, which is not only related to climate projections. For example, uncertainty can be reduced by improving the methodology for assessing vulnerability in different social contexts, promoting citizen science, through research on the participatory process applied to social transformation for adaptation and mitigation of climate change including trade-offs associated, barriers and facilitators (e.g., behavior of producers and consumers in terms of adaptation and mitigation), among others. Second, the management of disasters and extreme events requires that the integration of SSH consider, among others: migration and displacement-related aspects, fostering the adoption of the early warning system, the study of impacts and adaptation in heavily populated coastal areas, insurance-related aspects, socioeconomic impacts in general, and the resilience and recovery of communities in general or by sector (for example, energy, biodiversity, health, etc.), also in relation with education level and scientific disposition and susceptibility of communities. Third, the EU-LAC community needs to exploit its diversity and seeks to translate it into more detailed IPCC regional scenarios, to advance a more precise consideration of climatic and socio-economic differences between regions, regional/national perspectives within the global context, regional intra-specificities, and some key sectoral characteristics.

Global Challenges II

More data and larger models and datasets drive the need for larger computers. On top of these demands, there are new algorithms to compute on this data such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), including machine learning and deep learning. The Davos agenda 20212 emphasizes that society’s data needs are set to grow, as data increasingly informs our actions, so high performance computing (HPC) systems can help us understand and apply this data. In this sense, it is crucial that we democratize access to them so that more groups and organizations can realize the benefits targeting all of the identified societal challenges (let’s say, clusters in Horizon Europe): Health; Culture, creativity, and inclusive society; Civil security for society; Digital, industry, and space; Climate, energy, and mobility; and, Food, bio economy, all-natural resources, agriculture, and environment (water, air, soil). A cross-cutting digital Research Infrastructure (RI) based on HPC and data services in which AI capabilities can be applied is fully multidisciplinary and allows addressing every societal challenge. This Call aims at providing trans-national access (on-site or remote) and/or virtual access to an integrated digital RI service settled in both regions; training to EU and LAC scientists and technicians for using the RI; and activities to improve, customise and harmonise the services of the RI.

Health I

Personalised medicine (PM) is an innovative health area that has a high potential benefit for patients, citizens and health systems. The main goal for PM is prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases by considering individuals’ genotypes and phenotypes as well as other biomedical, life style and environmental data. Pre-clinical and clinical research combined with bioinformatics and data technologies focused on demonstrating the potential and clinical feasibility of personalised medicine in different diseases (personalised medicine is non-specific disease; therefore, research on every disease is encouraged). This could include the application and validation of known biomarkers in clinical practice, the development of diagnostic and clinical decision support tools, the stratification of patients and the prediction of response of the patients to personalised specific therapies, the use of genomics, machine learning and data integration to provide more personalised treatments, the gathering of toxicity and toxic-kinetic information (ecotoxicological studies) in order to allow characterising all risks to human health even by setting up in vitro and in vivo models, etc. Only small-scale exploratory clinical studies can be supported. A multidisciplinary transnational approach should be addressed, with the possibility to tackle further PM-related items, such as Health-economics or Ethical, Legal and Social aspects that arise in the conducted research.

Health II

EU initiatives such as ESFRI8 , have proved extremely useful in establishing a solid and efficient Research Infrastructure (RI) landscape in Europe. Although a regional plan to organise and develop RIs in LAC is still in its early stages, for global actions to be effective, the EU and LAC need common standards and a defined set of shared capacities. Open access to users is one of the crucial factors for RIs to be efficient. This call would thus launch a Regional Hub while also entrusting it with the task of replicating the model through a coordinated plan with other hubs, as a seed for a coherent, strategy-led approach to policy-making on RIs in LAC. This call should contemplate seed/matching funds to establish a first Regional Hub; planning for instrumentation, first period staffing, and dedicated support for the coordination of a regional network. The location of these Regional Hubs should also be planned, prioritising scientific excellence of active LAC centres and a proven track record of open access and networking commitment. Embracing actions of FAIR data might be one of the best legacies of this EU-LAC call: A Regional Hub of Integrative Bioimaging establishing FAIR data principles would set up a model to guide a growing network of LAC Regional Hubs with reliable quality and data openness standards.

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Research Infrastructures

The Ecosystem Services Framework (ESF) is considered a policy solution capable of realigning the private and social use of Natural Capital under the predicted IPCC climate change scenarios. To generate an (ESF) EU-LAC framework is necessary to enable modeling through the use of Virtual Research Environments (VRE) to predict fluctuations based on the provision of the ES due to changes of environmental factors induced by natural processes, land use, regulations. and climate change, helping scientific community, policymakers, businesses and civil society to drastically increase their knowledge on the management, use and value of natural resources (including ES), apply nature-based solutions for their management and improve their approach in developing efficient solutions towards climate resilient and sustainable communities based on an efficient use of natural resources and an effective adaptation strategy. An example may be the adaptation to temperature increase with sustainable green infra-structure cooling solutions (i.e., green roofs, green walls) that decrease energy demand, reduce fatalities during heatwaves and decrease of the heat island effect in urban environment. This call focuses on how the integration of ESF and climate science & biodiversity can contribute to build sustainable climate & biodiversity resilient communities

Interoperability of energy data spaces for an optimized exploitation by producers and prosumers /

Research Infrastructures

There is a clear relation between energy consumption and climate change that was firstly claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change First Assessment Report (IPCC AR1)17. Thus, it is urgently needed to address the double challenge of climate change mitigation and adaptation, so the fight against climate change is central to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In this sense, goal SDG7 focuses on affordable and clean energy, but nowadays, market availability of highly competitive clean technologies (notably, onshore wind and PV)18 is not sufficient on its own to drive the Clean Energy Transition (CET). Solutions must be adopted worldwide to become efficient and citizens must be an active part of the new energy market as prosumers, so the first step is to enable common energy data spaces that will made data available and re-usable, which is key when optimizing the energy mix coming from renewable energies. Technological solutions for achieving a higher degree of interoperability between energy data platforms is needed, but the SINCERE Action19 demonstrated that one of the greatest challenges for bi-regional cooperation on Global Change is the integration of SSH with climate science in order to make society an active actor in the coming decentralized energy market. This call pursues to embrace technological and SSH advances as a real driving force in the energy system for a CET encompassing all relevant actors, systems, and points of view

Eligible Entities: In order to be eligible, the applicants must contact their national Call Contact Persons in due time before submission to check their national eligibility.