The green shoots of urban agriculture

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City farming and food sharing are blossoming in Europe with the help of local traditions and EU research.

By Anthony King

Picture the following scene in the Netherlands: kids roll dice and move grandmother around a board to collect the ingredients she needs for a meal.

This is a boardgame proving popular with young children in a neighbourhood in the city of Utrecht. But there’s more to this entertainment than meets the eye.

Recipes and maps

‘At the end of the game, the kids get a little recipe card and a little map so that they can go find the food themselves in their own food forest,’ said Jessica Duncan, a sociologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands whose team designed the game.

Their food forest is part of Rijnvliet, a neighbourhood where residents can gather passion flowers, pears, herbs, apples and other ingredients. A group of artists has set up camp to bring the community together around foodie fun. They’ve cooked pizzas on a Friday evening with ingredients from the forest.

This Dutch food forest is just the tip of a burgeoning popularity of urban farms and communal food activities spreading through Europe as people embrace local, more sustainable produce.

‘We’re seeing a wave of food sharing emerging for a whole host of reasons,’ said Duncan, who has visited the food forest as part of a research project called CULTIVATE in which she participates.

Running for four years until the end of 2026, the project received EU funding to promote sustainable food sharing in Europe.

As Europe seeks to improve both human diets and agriculture’s environmental footprint, cities, suburbs and towns can be a trigger for change because they’re home to the majority of people living in the EU.

Urban authorities, residents and volunteer groups can set the bar for food production and consumption through the choices they make about procurement in schools and public canteens, the management of waste, local distribution chains and even the growing of food.

Such steps advance the European Green Deal’s goal of a sustainable food system in which the health of people, communities and the planet is recognised as being interconnected.

Sharing is caring

A collective called “Food Not Bombs” in the Polish city of Gdansk on the Baltic Sea provides another example of food sharing taking root in Europe.

Volunteers collect perishable food left at the end of market day to cook soup, offering it to tourists and homeless people alike for free.

A previous EU research project, SHARECITY, compiled a record of food-sharing initiatives like these. It mapped activities in 100 cities around the world, home to thousands of initiatives such as urban gardens, community kitchens, surplus food distribution and seed sharing.

‘We have always shared food,’ said Anna Davies, a professor of geography at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland who coordinates CULTIVATE. ‘It is the basis of human civilisation.’

Urban agriculture can be about reconnecting with nature, building relationships and acquiring new skills while gaining a sense of self-fulfilment. People often get a mental- health boost from enjoying the fruits of their labour with others, according to researchers.

‘Community gardens can generate a whole host of benefits – not just growing food – such as reducing loneliness and increasing health and wellbeing,’ said Davies.

Off the radar

Yet urban food endeavours can be absent from official plans on nutrition, social support and city development.

This is partly because community food-sharing efforts may have little time to promote their benefits.

‘Rarely are their impacts measured,’ said Davies.

An urban community garden might offer fulfilling activities for elderly volunteers or provide food for a school breakfast club, yet these contributions go largely unrecorded by authorities.

CULTIVATE wants to ensure food sharing becomes more widely known and appreciated.

It uses artificial intelligence to map, track and monitor European food-sharing initiatives that have an online presence.

An online platform – Sharing Solutions – will bring them to light and report on their environmental and social goals. It’ll be tested in Utrecht, Barcelona in Spain and Milan in Italy.

Cultural connection

Others too are taking a closer look at side benefits from urban agriculture.

Cristina Grasseni, a professor of cultural anthropology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, delves into food to investigate cultures.

‘Producing food seems to be positive for people’s mental health,’ she said.

Grasseni’s approach is to rub shoulders with her subjects of study, such as when she spent two seasons with Alpine cow herders taking cattle to high pastures.

More recently, Grasseni has volunteered at a city farm in Utrecht as part of an EU-funded project that she leads. Called FOOD CITIZENS, it began in September 2017 and runs until the end of February 2024.

Grasseni said urban food-culture initiatives can offer much more than the experience of going to a supermarket, ‘such as regaining contact with nature, getting your hands dirty, activating relationship networks and being in a low-stress environment.’

The project investigates people’s involvement in farming in European cities including Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

At a land trust north of Rotterdam, about 200 households jointly own 20 hectares of land and employ a farmer to grow food organically. The people involved learn from the farmer, take time to assist and share the harvest, whose size – depending on the growing conditions – determines how much food the participants receive.

Diverse patchwork

More than 50 case studies in the Netherlands, Italy and Poland show there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to self-organised food initiatives in Europe and no such thing as an average “food citizen”, according to Grasseni.

Food forests seem especially popular in the Netherlands, while Poland retains a culture of urban allotments for growing vegetables.

Rijnvliet was built on one of the last pieces of agricultural land in Utrecht and its food forest pays homage to that heritage. It offers greenery, locally grown food and a focal point for the community.

And there, kids are discovering that food really does grow on trees and looking forward to future harvests to fill granny’s recipes.

Research in this article was funded by the EU via the European Research Council (ERC).

FOOD 2030

The EU is seeking to spur a transition towards sustainable, healthy and inclusive food systems through its research and innovation policy framework known as “Food 2030”.

Food 2030 is driven by an awareness that current production and consumption patterns are affected by and contribute to crises including malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss and resources scarcity.

The framework brings together research and innovation players in different areas to tackle interconnected challenges through a systemic and multi-actor approach.

The main goals include developing knowledge and impactful solutions fostering sustainable healthy diets; climate-friendly, environmentally smart and circular food systems; and resilient and empowered communities. Other top goals are encouraging new business models, capacity building and education for a just and fair food-systems transition respecting planetary boundaries.

This article is relevant to the Food 2030 Pathway on urban food-systems transformation.

This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

Lynxes and vultures offer insights for European wildlife conservation

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EU research is providing the most far-reaching analysis of efforts to boost wild-cat populations and aiding scavengers that help balance the ecosystem.

By Vedrana Simičević

Anybody wondering about the hands-on challenges of wildlife conservation in Europe should consider a recent tale. It involves a wild cat, tracking signals and an eye-opening journey.

In spring 2023, environmentalists captured an adult male lynx in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains and released it in a Croatian national park called Plitvice Lakes. The move was part of an effort to increase the genetic diversity an endangered lynx population in Croatia and Slovenia.

New homes

The lynx, which had a telemetry tracking collar, spent several weeks trying to establish his new territory. He first ventured eastward to the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, then travelled more than 100 kilometres to the opposite side of Croatia near the border with Slovenia and finally – and hesitantly – returned to Plitvice to settle there.

Dr Miha Krofel, a wildlife-management expert from Slovenia, is seeking to build on such nail-biting successes as head of a research project that received EU funding to improve knowledge about lynxes’ behaviour after their release. Called LYNXONTHEMOVE, the project runs for two years through September 2024.

‘We are trying to understand the most important factors that influence the decision whether the animal would stay in a location of release or move to another area,’ said Krofel, who is an assistant professor at the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana.

While conservation efforts of this kind have shown growing success over the past two decades, the six-month survival rate of relocated carnivores is still only 66%, according to recent research. And just 37% of animals actually show reproductive behaviour.

In some cases, relocated animals simply move far from the designated area.

Troubling trends

Lynxes are among the most endangered species amid widespread warnings that the world is undergoing a sixth mass extinction 65 million years after the fifth one killed off dinosaurs. Unlike the five previous die-offs, the current mass extinction is driven primarily by human activity.

Lynxes have excellent eyesight and hearing, making them skilled hunters.

Yet, as a result of extensive hunting, inbreeding, habitat loss and lack of prey, lynx populations in some parts of Europe vanished at the start of the 20th century. In Croatia and Slovenia, for example, until recently only between 100 and 150 animals remained.

Although conservation efforts since the 1970s have helped reverse the overall trend, lynx populations in some countries and regions in Europe are still shrinking.

‘Generally, numbers are slowly increasing,’ said Krofel. ‘But in some places populations are still declining – for example in Austria, North Macedonia or in mountain areas in France.’

He has teamed up with a Spanish ecologist named Dr Mariano Rodríguez Recio from Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain.

They’re focusing on data from existing reintroduction programmes for the Iberian lynx in Spain and Eurasian lynx in Croatia and Slovenia. Using that information, the two researchers will analyse a variety of factors related to released animals’ behaviour.

Release methods

These medium-sized wild cats, notoriously difficult to spot in nature because of their speed, camouflage and tendency to be active mainly at night, are easier to reintroduce than some other carnivores like wolves or bears.

Still, success depends on tricky questions such as the method of release. An animal can be let go directly from the transport box or first placed in an “introductory” enclosure.

Environmental factors like forest cover, elevation and topography can also influence the animal’s movements and determine the success of the whole operation.

In addition, the LYNXONTHEMOVE team will assess the impact of human infrastructure. Highways, for example, are major barriers for animals, whereas gravel roads are frequented by lynxes to scout out information and communicate with one another.

‘They use gravel roads as a sort of information channel, almost like their Facebook,’ said Krofel.

Turf battles

Intraspecies interactions may play a further crucial role, according to scientists.

A male lynx, for example, could abandon an area where another male has already established territory and a female lynx might do the same if she senses an earlier female arrival.

The researchers will focus on the presence of other animals in a targeted area, adding to information that has been relatively scarce to date.

The team’s main data sources are cameras with infrared sensors and telemetry collars attached to every released animal and to a number of other lynxes.

With the help of Recio’s expertise, the project is using cutting-edge analysis and simulations of the movements of animals to predict their behaviour in a particular area depending on environmental factors.

The researchers expect the result to be the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of lynx relocation efforts.

‘Our results should give a better idea to conservation project managers to make a crucial decision: which are the best locations to release the animals and how to do it?’ said Krofel.

Endangered birds

Vultures are another species having a rough time as biodiversity declines.

Dr Sara Asu Schroer, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo in Norway, leads an EU-funded research project studying these scavengers from a social-sciences perspective.

Schroer is tackling the issue from the viewpoint of environmental anthropology, investigating how wildlife management occurs within historical and cultural contexts.

Called Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction, or LiVE, the four-year initiative began in August 2020.

Schroer has been visiting different areas in Spain, which, along with France, is home to more than 90% of Europe’s vultures. These include griffon vultures, bearded vultures, cinerous vultures and Egyptian vultures.

Balancing forces

These birds, which have up to three-metre-long wingspans, play a crucial role in ecosystems as scavengers that break down carcasses. In doing so, vultures contribute to the recycling of nutrients and may even contain the spread of diseases.

But by the end of the 19th century, human influences including poisoning of carcasses by farmers or hunters in Europe had brought most vulture species to the verge of extinction. The decline continued through the 20th century with limited success in conservation efforts.

Schroer is interviewing a range of people who are involved in vulture conservation – from biologists and ecologists to breeders and farmers. She wants to uncover the motivations behind these efforts.

‘What interests me particularly is how vultures’ way of life relates to humans and agricultural practices,’ said Schroer.

In India, for example, vulture populations plummeted in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a result of extensive use of a veterinary drug called diclofenac. While serving as an anti-inflammatory medicine in cattle, it proved to be deadly for vultures that fed on the bovine carcasses.

In Europe, vultures were often killed by humans who regarded the birds as competitors in hunting or simply as vermin.

New threats

Although conservation efforts have helped vulture populations in Europe, they’re now facing new threats including veterinary drugs in carcasses, power lines and wind farms.

Coexistence among humans, livestock and vultures can easily be disturbed by growing industrialisation and even government policies.

For example in the 1990s, when Britain faced a major outbreak of “mad cow” disease and was in the EU, a law forbade the practice of leaving livestock carcasses out in nature. Griffon vultures, heavily dependent on the carcasses for food, suddenly began to starve.

‘It’s an interesting case where you can really see how public health policies can affect conservation,’ said Schroer.

A goal of her project is to understand how different regulations and management practices can have adverse effects on animals.

‘What social and cultural analysis brings to the table, which natural-science analysis is lacking, is to look at the broader social and cultural context – including historical practices and lessons — and observe vulture conservation in light of all these developments,’ said Schroer.

Research in this article was funded by the EU via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

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Longstanding questions about how migratory animals navigate are being answered through the study of eye molecules and the quantum realm.

By Gareth Willmer

Grey-brown bogong moths may not be much to look at, but every year they perform a nocturnal journey worthy of attention. Billions of them fly as many as 1 000 kilometres from plains in eastern Australia to mountain caves to escape the summer heat.

Arriving in late September from their breeding grounds, up to 17 000 moths pack each square metre of cave wall and lie in a dormant state in a southeast mountain range known as the Australian Alps.

Extra sense

‘It usually looks like the scales of a fish if you go into these caves during the summer,’ said Professor Eric Warrant, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden. ‘It’s absolutely amazing.’

In autumn, the moths fly back to mate, lay eggs and die. Their progeny repeat the voyage without any experience of it – a feat that has long puzzled researchers.

While it has been known that insects, birds, turtles and fish can navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field, the specific mechanisms employed to activate this “sixth sense” have remained mysterious. So too has the connection with other potential sensory cues.

Greater knowledge in this area could bolster conservations efforts and help stem widespread losses in biodiversity amid warnings from scientists that the world is facing a sixth mass extinction.

In 2019, the bogong-moth population suffered a 99.5% collapse as a result of drought. Although the numbers have risen since, they’re still well down compared with before.

Crucial species

The moths are crucial for plant life that they pollinate and for wildlife that depends on them for food. One such animal is the critically endangered mountain pygmy possum.

‘The bogong month is a keystone species in the alpine ecosystem, so their survival is critical,’ said Warrant.

He led a project that received EU funding to uncover some of the secrets of the bogong moths’ navigating abilities. Called MagneticMoth, the project ended in August 2023 after six years.

Warrant’s team tethered migrating bogong moths in an outdoor flight simulator. In doing so, the researchers confirmed that the moths did indeed use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

The next task was to find out how the moths do this and where the mechanisms responsible are located.

The team investigated molecules called cryptochromes. In birds, evidence suggests that cryptochrome in the eyes may enable them to “see” magnetic fields.

While the project’s genetic analysis has yet to yield final results, Warrant believes they will prove that cryptochromes are responsible for magnetic sensing in bogong moths.

Starry surprise

The team also made discoveries that took matters in new directions.

‘We found out a few other things that I think are actually even more exciting than this sensing,’ said Warrant.

One is that bogong moths use the stars – in addition to the Earth’s magnetic field – to navigate. In the laboratory, their brain cells responded to the rotation of a projected night sky.

Warrant said the ability to use night-sky cues to navigate in a specific compass direction was previously known only in humans and in some species of nocturnally migrating birds. The moths possess it while having a much smaller head.

‘The moths seem able to travel in their inherited migratory direction under a starry night sky even if we remove Earth’s magnetic field,’ Warrant said. ‘If you have this tiny insect with a brain a tenth the volume of a grain of rice and eyes smaller than a pinhead, that they can do this is surprising.’

The finding suggests bogong moths may also be using a “hierarchy” of cues to navigate, with the ability to rely on different ones when others aren’t available. Pending further research, Warrant suspects the stars may even be the dominant cue.

Quantum ideas

Understanding how migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field has also been a challenge with implication for conservation efforts.

That’s partly because the magnetic interactions at play have seemed too weak to trigger the required chemical reactions.

But attention is now turning to one possible explanation: atomic and subatomic “quantum” scales, at which behaviour of matter doesn’t follow typical rules.

‘There’s a quantum-mechanical mechanism by which such weak magnetic interactions can affect chemistry,’ said Professor Peter Hore, a chemist at the University of Oxford in the UK.

He’s pursuing this avenue as co-coordinator of an EU-funded project called QuantumBirds. It runs for six years until the end of March 2025.

Blue light

As with bogong moths, the focus is on cryptochromes serving as a compass for birds to navigate during migration.

Derived from the Greek for “hidden colour”, cryptochromes are molecules sensitive to blue light in certain animals and thought to be involved in magnetic-field sensing in a number of species.

‘Migratory birds have at least six different cryptochromes in their eyes,’ said Hore. ‘We needed to work out which was most likely to have a magnetic-sensing function.’

The team settled on a candidate called cryptochrome 4a – Cry4a – for several reasons including changing levels of the protein in night-migratory European robins.

‘Cryptochrome 4a shows a seasonal variation, with higher levels in the spring and autumn,’ said Hore. ‘That would be consistent with migration.’

With Cry4a in lab cultures, the QuantumBirds team found evidence that the molecule was indeed magnetically sensitive – and more so than the same proteins in non-migratory pigeons and chickens.

While testing Cry4a in live robins would be needed to confirm this as the mechanism, the results are promising, according to Hore.

‘This cryptochrome seems to have the right properties to be the basis of the birds’ magnetic compass,’ he said.

Homing instinct

Understanding how migratory birds navigate could be key to future conservation, particularly given that it is difficult to relocate them because of an instinct they have to fly back to their habitat, according to Hore.

‘If we could understand the mechanisms they use to navigate, maybe we could fool them into thinking they want to stay where we’ve put them,’ he said.

For his part, Warrant at Lund University said greater knowledge about how creatures including bogong moths navigate could lead to the development of alternative navigation systems to GPS for people to use.

Understanding the homing instincts of moths – coupled with the pivotal role that they play in the ecosystem – is yet another reason to ensure their protection.

‘Raising awareness that even a humble insect is worth saving is an important step in the right direction,’ Warrant said.

Research in this article was funded by the EU.This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

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A shift in diets is central to tackling obesity and climate change, according to Eric Lambin, a member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors.

By HORIZON STAFF

Human health is inextricably linked to food and the environment. The world, including Europe, faces emergencies on all three fronts.

The current food system is damaging people’s health by contributing to obesity and destroying the environment by, among other things, causing greenhouse-gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

Given the high stakes and challenges, Horizon Magazine plans a five-part series of articles over the remainder of 2023 on “sustainable food”. The aim is to highlight the promises of bringing about fundamental improvements in this area including with the help of research and innovation.

Today’s start of the series sets the stage by featuring an interview with Eric Lambin, a professor of geography and sustainability science at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium.

Lambin is also a member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors (GCSA), which produced a June 2023 Scientific Opinion entitled “Towards Sustainable Food Consumption”. The opinion was requested by European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides.

The ensuing articles in the series will focus on dietary shifts, urban food systems, the microbiome and the role of legislation.

1. Food, health and sustainability have been linked for thousands of years. Why should people today pay any particular attention to this area?

We are now facing a public health crisis – with widespread overweight, obesity and malnutrition issues – and a global environmental crisis.

Today, livestock accounts for more than 14% of human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions, which is more than the emissions from all the world’s cars and trucks. Production of meat – especially beef – drives climate change directly by emitting methane and indirectly by converting tropical forests for pastures and animal-feed production. Forest conversion not only adds to emissions but also causes biodiversity loss. We imagine most of the green fields we drive past are crops for humans to eat, whereas in fact two-thirds of the world’s agricultural lands are grazing lands and 40% of the world’s cropland is for animal feed.

Our Scientific Opinion calls for system-wide changes to correct this.

2. What would a more sustainable food system mean concretely?

For most Europeans, diets should be more plant-based as they are often too high in meat and dairy products, which have much higher environmental footprints than plant-based foods.

To shift towards a healthier and more sustainable diet, it is recommended to consume more legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds and less meat – especially red and processed meat – fewer foods rich in saturated fat, salt and sugar, fewer snacks with poor nutritional qualities and fewer ultra-processed foods, sugary drinks and alcoholic drinks.

For animal-based foods, we should prioritise the consumption of sustainably sourced fish and seafood.

We also need to reduce food waste to minimise the unnecessary use of resources for growing, harvesting, transporting and packaging food that ends up in landfills.

3. What role can the EU play to ensure that food is healthier and greener?

The Scientific Opinion recommends that policy measures aiming to change consumer behaviour should focus on the whole “food environment”. That is anywhere where people obtain, eat and discuss their food.

So policy measures should address not only consumers but also food providers, producers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. The competences needed to accelerate a transition towards more sustainable and healthy diets are distributed at all levels of governance, from the EU to Member States, regions and municipalities.

The EU can provide guidelines, adjust subsidies, develop labels, expand its current carbon-pricing scheme, among other things, and encourage Member States to act at their level.

4. What is the GCSA recommending in terms of EU action in this field?

The EU should adopt a mix of complementary policies based on pricing, information and regulation.

Healthy and sustainable diets should be the easiest and most affordable choice. EU Member States should consider new incentives including lower value-added tax on fruits and vegetables as well as disincentives such as meat and sugar taxes.

The provision of trusted information about the environmental and health impacts of different foods facilitates healthy and sustainable decision-making by consumers. This is about such things as food literacy, national dietary guidelines and front-of-pack labels.

New policy measures should also make healthy and sustainable diets more available and accessible. This means, for example, the prominent placement of healthy products in retail outlets.

5. What role does scientific advice, including from the GCSA, play in policymaking?

Scientific advice supports evidence-based policymaking by analysing scientific findings on a given topic, based on high-quality science.

Scientific advisors are intermediaries between science and policy. They need to demonstrate their trustworthiness by following a transparent and an impartial process to analyse evidence. The GCSA works closely with the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies – or SAPEA – consortium. SAPEA assembles multi-disciplinary groups of the best European experts on the topics for which advice is requested by the College of Commissioners.

On matters such as food systems, for which strong vested interests exert influence on policymaking, it is essential to provide independent, science-based recommendations.

6. How can consumers help drive change?

Consumers can contribute through well-informed purchasing decisions that are consistent with their values.

But models of behavioural change recognise that motivation alone isn’t sufficient to modify diets. Consumers also need to have the capability and opportunity to adopt new behaviours.

Consumer behaviours are influenced both by personal factors – such as taste preferences, attitudes and knowledge – and by external factors, mainly price, information and social and cultural norms.

All factors must be addressed. Hence the need for a raft of diverse measures targeting the whole food environment that complement each other.

7. What should be the balance between international and local food trade?

Evidence shows that locally produced food isn’t always more sustainable than food imported from abroad. For example, some vegetables grown in Europe in greenhouses may use more energy input than vegetables grown in Africa.

Yet, to promote sustainable consumption, the EU could restrict imports of food commodities from places where food production causes major environmental damage – for example, foods from biodiversity-rich and carbon-dense ecosystems, water-demanding crops produced in water-scarce areas and seafood sourced from unsustainably managed stocks.

Some of these restrictions are already covered by new EU legislation on deforestation-free products.

8. How can the EU help ensure that small farmers get treated fairly?

Small farms may struggle to adapt to new regulations as they may lack the capacity to invest in new practices and production systems.

Yet they play a key role in some European regions for providing food, maintaining cultural landscapes and keeping rural areas socially attractive.

Small farmers aren’t always as well represented in multi-stakeholder policy dialogues as their large counterparts. Therefore, new policy measures should anticipate possible adverse effects on small farms and be monitored and periodically reviewed to ensure they don’t have unintended consequences.

9. What are the main social and political challenges to change?

As in every transformative process, there is resistance from vested interests who benefit from the status quo. It is critical to create an environment that allows all stakeholders to work towards the goal of healthy and sustainable food.

This approach may also help to overcome opposition from those who profit from the current system, including some large private-sector organisations with powerful voices. For example, food-industry representatives have much more resources to defend their case than, say, future generations, thereby creating an imbalance in the debate.

Civil-society organisations have an important role in representing the voiceless.

10. What role does animal well-being have in all this?

Animal welfare is a key ethical dimension of sustainability. It is also central to a “One Health” perspective that integrates the health of people, animals and the environment.

People shift to plant-based diets for health, environmental and/or animal-welfare motives. All three motivations are equally important and they point towards the same direction: decreasing the consumption of animal-sourced products and decreasing intensive animal farming.

This creates an opportunity for companies with a focus on quality products and high animal- welfare standards. For policy, a meat tax framed as an “animal-welfare levy” might be more socially acceptable than an environmental tax.

This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

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