Targeted challenges

Targeted challenges within Sustainable Industry

Within the larger scope of sustainable industry, that is covered by this Call, two areas of interest have been identified specifically by the national funding bodies supporting the Call:

• Green ICT – ICT technologies are a key enabler of a green transition for production and consumption patterns in every business and every part of society. However, the digital technologies that are crucial for these ecosystems consist of electronic components, software and systems that can consume a large amount of energy and resources over their life cycle from production to installation, use and maintenance to disposal or recycling.
  Therefore, it is also important to advance research and development towards more sustainable electronic components, software and systems for information and communication technologies supporting sustainable manufacturing. Sustainable manufacturing should implement green ICT solutions in factories, operations, processes, and product planning. Furthermore, to achieve energy efficiency in terms of use of calculation power and related electronic devices, the sustainability idea must also include the design of economical and frugal data capture and processing from the outset.
• Space-earth-ocean integrated systems for better observation and data exploitation – The challenge is to create application-based ecosystems that take advantage of the rapidly developing space, ocean and land/aerial monitoring techniques and technologies and to create new capabilities and demand-driven purpose-built ecosystems that take advantage of the rapid development of digital technologies (e.g. data driven systems). These new capabilities shall support the move to a net zero emissions economy, contributing to climate control, monitoring and management of natural resources, sustainable food production and societal protection, amongst other opportunities.

Below you can find a list of topics, that are examples of technologies and application areas which could fit within the Call. Some of them are related to the focus areas, some are examples of the broader scope of sustainable industry. The mentioned areas are indicative and not exclusive.