Collective projects

In recent years, India and Europe have collaborated extensively to enhance and enrich each other's technological and scientific knowledge and management capacities to cope with increasing stress on water resources. Increasing heterogeneity in the uneven distribution of water resources triggered by climate change, extreme water-related events (floods and droughts) and increasing demand due to population growth and economic development add additional stress to water, environment and food security and to the national economy.

To help mitigate the risks related to earthquakes, citizens need additional protection that goes beyond building codes and retrofitting actions. Early warning approaches and operational earthquake forecasting, which are under development, need to be seen in a Europe-wide perspective, building on improved, dense, robust and high quality seismic networks and new processing tools and activities.

A broad range of economic activities are dependent upon natural capital, but natural assets are not unlimited. However, many ecosystem services and benefits to society and business, such as food provision, air and water filtration, disaster risk reduction, pollination, or climate regulation, are not visible because they are not priced on markets and hence not currently accounted for in socio-economic decision-making.

The EU has ample experience in building and running data repositories to support biomedical research. Notable initiatives are ELIXIR and the European Genome-phenome Archive, storing many types of data up to the population-wide level. Similar expertise exists in Canada notably via IHEC (International Human Epigenome Consortium) and its Data Portal as well as PhenomeCentral, a repository for clinicians and scientists working on human rare disorders.

The world is facing a critical healthcare problem: due to a growing and aging population increasingly exposed to a number of well-known and new risk factors, cancer is becoming one of the most important public health problems worldwide.

The building stock in Europe today is not fit to support a shift from institutional care to the home-based independent living model for the ageing population.

The Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD) aims to coordinate research on chronic diseases at a global level in order to enhance knowledge exchange across individual projects, and to better understand the impact of socio-economic, cultural, geopolitical and policy on research findings, so as to appropriately adapt interventions and scale-up to different geographical, economic and cultural settings.

Health conditions linked to end-of-life issues, acute and chronic pain, life-threatening non-communicable diseases, late or long term side effects and consequences of diseases and their treatments impact quality of life and pose an immense societal and economic burden. Palliative, end-of-life and survivorship care benefits patients with malignant and non-malignant chronic health conditions, providing relief from their symptoms and improving their quality of life. From 38% to 74.0% of the affected population is estimated to be in need of palliative care.

Citizens in ageing populations wish to stay in their homes for as long as possible. They are however at risk of age related impairments such as poor health, cognitive impairment, frailty and social exclusion with considerable negative consequences for their independence, quality of life, that of those who care for them, and for the sustainability of health and care systems.

The Communication on the mid-term review of the implementation of the Digital Single Market Strategy (COM(2017)228) identified three priorities on digital transformation of health and care (DTHC): citizens' access to their data; data infrastructure; interaction between citizens and healthcare providers for better health management. That document indicated that specific measures would be elaborated in a dedicated Communication to be adopted in the months to follow.