Understanding the Impacts of and the Opportunities Offered by Digital Transformation

Deadline: 06-Oct-21

European Commission is calling proposals for Understanding the Impacts of and the Opportunities Offered by Digital Transformation, new emerging technologies, and social innovation on biodiversity.

Scope

• Proposals should generate, collect and distribute knowledge on how to tackle the indirect drivers of biodiversity loss linked to technological and social innovation, which includes digitalisation.
• They should also assess the impacts on biodiversity of the digital divide between urban, peri-urban and rural areas.
• Proposals should explain how changes in their societies are fostered by technological and social innovation impacting biodiversity – for example by bringing in new and emerging technologies, new production processes, consumer products, regulations, incentives, or participatory processes, which change how socio-technical and socio-ecological systems operate.
• Proposals are expected to contribute to informing stakeholders and users on the social and technological impacts of new and emerging technologies that are not covered by existing procedures for biodiversity-related risk assessments.
• This includes the wider positive and negative impacts on societal values, behaviour, institutional, financial and business frameworks, which in turn are having an impact on biodiversity and the capacity of ecosystems to provide a wide range of services.
• Proposals should assess which tools further mainstream biodiversity into policy making, and governance (including financing, the promotion of innovation, and bringing in new and emerging technologies) to achieve transformative action that benefits biodiversity, to avoid, mitigate or manage conflicts linked to these transformational changes. In doing this, proposals should engage with civil society, policy makers, finance and business leaders, to create a toolbox for transformative change via action on biodiversity.
• Proposals should build their analysis on the synergies between multiple Sustainable Development Goals to deliver both direct and indirect biodiversity benefits, staying within planetary boundaries, and on the role of biodiversity in reaching the set of Sustainable Development Goals.
• Proposals should factor in impacts and opportunities of digital transformation, new emerging technologies and social innovation on biodiversity.
• This explicitly includes the interdependence of biodiversity loss and climate change, and the impacts on biodiversity of digital, technological or social approaches on action to mitigate and adapt to climate change – and vice versa.
• Proposals should develop pathways for digital developments to achieve a successful twin digital and biodiversity transition.
• They should develop methodologies to assess their impacts (including the impacts from energy/electricity infrastructure, or on democracy and on trust in science) on environmental, social and economic systems.
• Such assessments should focus on the direct and indirect effects of digital developments on biodiversity, intertwined with climate change and health.
• Proposals should provide case studies and a collection of good and failed examples, including current relevant business models, the role of citizen science, and scenarios that could provide useful impact to these transformations and inform and inspire transformative change through learning, co-creation and dialogue.
• Proposals should include specific tasks and allocate sufficient resources to develop joint deliverables (e.g. activities, workshops, and joint communication and dissemination) with all projects on transformative change related to biodiversity funded under this destination.
• They should use existing platforms and information sharing mechanisms relevant to transformational change and to biodiversity knowledge. Furthermore, projects are expected to cooperate with the Biodiversity Partnership and the Science Service.
• Proposals should show how their results and outcomes can provide timely information to major science-policy bodies such as the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to the Convention on Biological Diversity. They are expected to cooperate with projects ‘HORIZON-CL6-2021-BIODIV-01-20: Support to processes triggered by IPBES and IPCC’ and ‘HORIZON-CL6-2021-BIODIV-2022-01-10: Cooperation with the Convention on Biological Diversity’.
• Where relevant, projects are expected to create links to and use information, data and impact-related knowledge from the European Earth observation programme Copernicus, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

Funding Information

Grant amount is equal to or greater than EUR 500 000 except for:

• public bodies (entities established as a public body under national law, including local, regional or national authorities) or international organisations; and
• cases where the individual requested grant amount is not more than EUR 60 000 (lowvalue grant).

Expected Outcomes

Project should address all following outcomes:

• A better understanding, today and for the future, of the impacts on, risks and opportunities for biodiversity of digital transformation (for example smart technologies, artificial intelligence, automation, miniaturised sensors, citizen science applications, crowdsourcing), new materials (e.g. for biomimicry), and new and emerging technologies.
• Identification and an assessment of how system-level change affecting biodiversity through social innovation happens.
• This should cover bringing in new technologies, new production processes, consumer products, regulations, incentives, or participatory processes, and changes how socio-technical and socio-ecological systems operate.
• Making proposals for safeguards to build public understanding of the range of diverse values held by members of the public (i.e. indigenous communities, youth, women, vulnerable groups in society, socially or economically marginalised groups), to promote democracy and a socially just transition taking action on biodiversity.
• Proposals should promote incorporating these safeguards in transformative processes linked to the digital sector and technology, which can have positive or negative impacts on biodiversity and on the wide range of services ecosystems can provide.
• Demonstrating the potential of social innovation to tackle biodiversity loss, as well as using biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides, with nature-based solutions as case studies. Demonstrating how nature-based solutions, enabled by social innovation, tackle poverty, low resilience and social inequality to achieve a just transition.
• Testing active intervention by R&I policy and sector policies (niche creation, reformulation of governance, ‘exnovation’), also by empowering and endowing communities.
• Approaches, tools and knowledge influence policies provided at the right level on transformative change for biodiversity. The key elements for this change are to be delivered by the portfolio of cooperating projects (of which these projects form part).

Eligibility Criteria

• Any legal entity, regardless of its place of establishment, including legal entities from non-associated third countries or international organisations (including international European research organisations) is eligible to participate (whether it is eligible for funding or not), provided that the conditions laid down in the Horizon Europe Regulation have been met, along with any other conditions laid down in the specific call topic.
• A ‘legal entity’ means any natural or legal person created and recognised as such under national law, EU law or international law, which has legal personality and which may, acting in its own name, exercise rights and be subject to obligations, or an entity without legal personality.
• To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e:
  • the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions;
  • the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States;
  • eligible non-EU countries:
    • countries associated to Horizon Europe
    • low- and middle-income countries

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