Cities struggle in their transition to implement a full circular economy model incorporating regenerative practices. There is a clear need for cities to become circular in order to alter urban consumption patterns and value chains, and to stimulate innovation, business opportunities, and job creation in both established and newly created sectors.
Under the Paris Agreement (PA), Parties of the UNFCCC have to submit and periodically update Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which represent their undertaking to pursue the objectives the Agreement. Parties have also committed to formulate and communicate their mid-century low greenhouse gas emission development strategies by 2020. The collective progress towards achieving the objectives of the PA will be periodically assessed, with the first ‘global stocktake’ envisaged to take place in 2023.
Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) have provided today’s society with a vast array of innovative capabilities to solve several challenges related to resource efficiency, climate change and sustainable development. Harnessing this technology within the water sector creates a more intelligent means of managing and protecting the planet’s water resources and lays the foundation of a water-smart society.
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.