Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EN-SUGI (Eranet Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative)

Teaser

The Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus is a call jointly established by the Belmont Forum, the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe and the European Commission under the ERA-NET frame. The cooperation was established in order to...

Summary

The Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus is a call jointly established by the Belmont Forum, the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe and the European Commission under the ERA-NET frame. The cooperation was established in order to bring together the fragmented research and expertise across the globe to find innovative new solutions to the Food-Water-Energy Nexus challenge.
The interactions between food, water and energy are of paramount interest to policy, science and the society at large, today and even more so in the upcoming decades. Challenges connected with population increase and food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources demand solutions.

The Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus is a joint call among 26 funding agencies from 22 countries in the world. It has been established in order to bring together actors to find innovative new solutions to the Food-Water-Energy Nexus challenge. The ultimate goal is to increase the access and the quality of life.

The overall challenge today is to move to action through dialogue: from a sector oriented technocratic approach to one that recognises more diverse viewpoints and rationalities.

Belmont Forum, JPI Urban Europe and the European Commission have partnered to ensure participants across physical, natural, social sciences and arts and humanities as well as policy and decision makers and stakeholders around the world.

The call topics will enable the participants to develop projects that aim to find solutions to the Food-Water-Energy nexus for a sustainable urbanisation. The goal is to rapidly evolve the knowledge base, advance indicators and assessment tools that are needed for a comprehensive understanding of the FWE nexus.

Work performed

Through the delivery time of the project specific activities have been created to reach the success of the joint BF/JPI UE Open call/ Eranet.
In addition to the BF and the JPI Urban Europe during the project the African Start Alliance, representing all African PIs has joint the project, providing a wider outreach and global dimension to the Eranet.
Activity 1(WP 2):
Relationship between the JPI UE and the Belmont Forum implementation team. The initial challenge requested a strong joint force and pooling between JPI Urban Europe and BF FAs together (WP1) to make this a real global call (WP2) 20 Nations worldwide and 24 FAs (17 EU + 7non EU) FAs.

Success: Overall successful joint coordination of all the activities related to the joint Call for Urban Food Energy Water nexus among funding agencies from JPI Urban Europe and Belmont Forum. Timescale: Month 1 on going.

Activity 2 (WP 3 and WP4) : Building on existing experience and apply well-proved project selection procedures to select co-creative, transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial projects by using competitive sub criteria for project selection, having four reviewers from different fields, implementing a two-stage procedure and initial workshops incubators (WP2 and WP3)

Success:
Launch of the joint call – Dec 2016
Organisation of three workshops incubators – Between Dec 2016 and Feb 2017
Organisation of the Joint Call Secretariat – From Sept 2016 ongoing
Pre- selection - from March 2017 to May 2017
Invitation to the stage 2 – May 2017
Second stage Deadline – Sept 2017
Final selection – November 2017
Award and Grants – from Dec 2017 onward

Activity 3 (WP 5):
Establishing of active monitoring activities to ensure innovation and impact delivery outcomes. WP 5 will act as a bridge between the Launch and Evaluation activities and the exploitation of results
Success: Identification of common impact and evaluation measurements to monitor the results of the project

Activity 4 (WP 6):
Disseminating results organised in synergy with BF and other relevant networks (JPIs). Setting of a dynamic stakeholder engagement plan

Success:
Definition of a SUGI Connect platform for the Projects to connect among each other. SUGI Connect strives to facilitate a two-way communication between the projects and the identified nodes and support them to actively use them to reach out beyond their own channels, also to encourage knowledge transfer among different stakeholders by promoting projects websites and - more importantly – by disseminating results and outcomes.

Final results

The progresses during the Interim report period are described according to each Main Activity.

1. Management and Coordination

The overall goal of this activity is to ensure an efficient and smooth action from the very beginning of the project and to coordinate and overlook the EU and non-EU dimension of the project
Significant results:

Total number of Funding Agencies involved: 24
Total number of countries involved in the projects awarded: 20
Continents involved: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America
2 JPI UE and BF F2f meetings have taken places
5 JPI UE F2F Funding Agencies meetings have taken places
1 Project Meeting with all awarded projects has taken place
Total amount of Budget available (JPI UE + EC + BF); 28.5 M Euros

2. Preparation, Launch and Operative Management of the call
Design and deliver the open call among all the funding agencies involved in EU and outside EU

Significant results
Number of proposals initially submitted: 88
Number of proposals invited for grant: 15
Number of project partners: 135
Project partners per organisation:
4 Community (i.e Councils, cities…)
25 Business
19 RTOs
19 Non-profit
66 Academia
2 Others

3. Evaluation and proposal selection of the co-funded call
the main goal is to create a fully alligned evaluation process between the JPI UE funding agencies and the Belmont Forum (BF) ones for both stage 1 and stage 2 of the open call.

Significant results:
76 proposals submitted in stage
23 evaluators involved
40 proposals invited in stage 2
15 projects funded
20 nations represented in the projects awarded

4. Monitoring and Assessment of Innovation and Impact Delivery of Projects Resulting from the Co-Funded Call

Monitoring and Assessment of Innovation and Impact Delivery aims to provide a proactive approach to innovation and impact delivery at a programme and project level. The pilot to develop the proactive approach is motivated by the ambitious objective and expected impact to create and test a novel model to pursue the innovation and impact.

Significant results:
Definition of the Terms of Reference evaluation and monitoring framework
Definition of the IAIID toolkit
Launch of the monitoring period
Identification of the Experts for the Impact assessment of the reports

5. Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation
SUGI communication activities are developed in line with the JPI Urban Europe and Belmont Forum communication strategy and match the needs of SUGI.

Significant results:
creation of SUGI website: www.sugi.nexus.org
Production of a call promotion tool kit incl. ppt-presentations, flyer, logos and illustrations, information for websites
definition of communication and exploitation strategy
organisation of Kick off meetings and meetings for awarded partners.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.sugi-nexus.org.