As 2025 comes into full force, the time has come to reflect on the endeavours undertaken in the past year and to define priorities and aspirations for the year ahead.
Last year marked the start of NEUROCLIMA, a Horizon Europe Project led by the Department of Design at Politecnico de Milano in a consortium of 15 partners across Europe. The project aims to promote and support the EU Adaptation Strategy and the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change by raising citizen’s awareness about climate resilience strategies and building a nervous system that connects policymakers, public institutions and citizens through innovative tools that combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human capabilities.
The kick-off meeting took place on January 29th and 30th, 2024, in Milan. The meeting provided a platform for the partners to begin contact and identify synergies points to ensure the success of the development of the project since the initial phase.
On May 23rd and May 24th, 2024, a second consortium meeting was held in Lisbon, delving into fruitful and collaborative discussions to ensure the achievement of the project’s ambitious goals and objectives. Staying truth to the project’s essence of collaborative development and co-creating, the activities carried out focused on the framework of educational toolkits, the technical development of the pilots and the uses cases deployment, operation, validation and assessment. Additionally, several other projects developed by the partners were presented to explore opportunities for synergies and for improving dissemination among target audiences.
The opportunity of synergy, aligned with outreach enhance and knowledge exchange, led NEUROCLIMA and Orbis, two Horizon Europe projects, to organise the joint event “Tech(&)Democracy”, at Foundazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, under the scope of the Milano Digital Week 2024. The event consisted of three thematic conversations with influential voices, built upon preliminary insights from the projects, which experiment with new socio-technical models and solutions to promote a more deliberative and inclusive democracy. The backdrop of the debates took also into consideration the necessity of acknowledging the increasingly influential role played by technology in deliberative democracy.
On November 21st and 22nd, 2024, the NEUROCLIMA Consortium gathered in Athens, for a two-day meeting filled with fruitful and collaborative discussions to prepare the design and implementation of the project pilots and to ensure the success of the upcoming phases of the project.
2025 will be a crucial year for NEUROCLIMA, where the technical, operational and interoperability specifications and reference architecture of the project’s tools and solutions will be place into action and tested in two pilots that will last until 2026. In addition, the consortium partners will continue working together to maximise the awareness to climate change adaptation and resilience, as well as the support and the promotion of the EU Adaptation Strategy and the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change.
