Strengthen the bilateral cooperation on research infrastructures with Africa: improving the knowledge base on climate change in Africa

Over recent years, the European Commission, Member States (MS) and Associated Countries (AC) have been closely collaborating, in particular within the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), to develop an integrated and efficient ecosystem of research infrastructures (RIs) in Europe, which encompasses single-sited facilities, distributed facilities integrating resources across the European Research Area, as well as networks of national facilities and which serves researchers and engineers in all S&T fields, from basic to applied research. To facilitate integration and pooling of resources for the development of new capacities, a legal instrument has also been developed at European level, the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) that provides favourable conditions for the establishment and operation of large European infrastructures supported jointly by several MSs and ACs as well as by third countries. While Member States remain central in the development and financing of public RIs, the Union and ESFRI play a catalysing and leveraging role in driving the integration between national efforts.

The challenges for the near future are to consolidate and optimise the European Research Infrastructure landscape and enhance its capacity to support frontier research and address the emerging and new scientific and societal objectives associated with the transition towards a sustainable and resilient Europe. In addition, there is the need to define and implement an effective and sound RI strategy in Europe, in close cooperation with ESFRI, MSs and ACs, which is complemented by and interlocks with the long-term ambition of creating an integrated Technology Infrastructure (TI) landscape, the latter is supported in Pillar II of Horizon Europe Programme (HE). Such a strategy would also help in exploiting synergies between RI and TI financed from Horizon and massive investments in infrastructures from ERDF.

This destination aims to create a world-leading coherent, agile and attractive RI landscape in Europe, by reducing its fragmentation at European, national and regional level, ensuring coordination of efforts and fostering alignment of priorities among MSs and ACs, connecting RIs to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and which is able to support national and regional R&I ecosystems. The support to a European strategy for Research Infrastructures as well as activities to enhance the role of RIs for international cooperation and science diplomacy will also be covered under this destination.

Expected impact

Proposals for topics under this destination should set out a credible pathway to contributing to one or several of the following impacts:

• Disruptive research and breakthrough science and innovation through cutting-edge, interconnected and sustainable Research Infrastructures;
• Strengthened scientific excellence and performance and efficiency of the European Research Area, increasing its attractiveness to researchers from all over the world;
• Coordinated research infrastructure capacity among countries and regions, also by exploiting possibilities given by the smart specialisation processes;
• Reinforced R&I capacities enabling systemic changes needed for a truly transformative societal and economic recovery and a strengthened resilience of critical sectors, as outlined in the Recovery Plan;
• Improved European response, in cooperation with international players, to emerging socio-economic and related scientific and technological challenges at global level.

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