Green Deal Challenge? The EIC supports the solutions!

On 15 December 2021, the European Commission adopted a new set of proposals to support the ambition captured in the Green Deal to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 - and boosting its competitiveness while doing so. Today’s package includes, amongst others, proposals on restoring sustainable carbon cycles, revising the directive on the energy performance of buildings, and a new EU urban mobility framework.

It is clear that the ambition of the Green Deal and these new proposals is enormous. To reach them, we need hard work, change our habits and we need new and innovative solutions. And this is where the European Innovation Council (EIC) comes in. It supports the most visionary researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs to transfer fundamental research and ideas into market opportunities.

In the past months, we have been closely working with a number of disruptive projects that really have the opportunity to become game-changers and will deliver tangible results to support the objectives of the Green Deal. Let us give some examples of inspiring projects that the EIC supports:

The ‘Madonna’ project is working on capturing CO₂ from the air with biological processes embedded in building bricks. The ‘Fungar’ proposes living architecture concepts to enable buildings to self-grow and adapt to the environment. The ‘Artibled’ project is working to produce light and heating with bioluminescent proteins, while the ‘Most’ aims at capturing solar energy during the summer and use it in winter through small-scale molecular storage, and the Optagon converts light into cooling via optical near-field thermophotonics. Through the EIC accelerator program, which aims to scale up more mature technologies, we are supporting the ‘e-plant’ project to directly generate electricity from living plants for smart cities and buildings, or the Woodoo project on functionalized and transparent wood for facades and windows.

Other breakthrough research directions merge life science and engineering, such as the EIC Pathfinder project HyPhOE that wants to develop bio electronic systems integrated to photosynthetic organisms that could pave the way for electronically-functionalized plants, for application in environmental intelligence or plant physiological control. In the field of restoration of carbon cycles, the FutureAgriculture aims at improving natural photosynthesis and increase carbon fixation capabilities of plants, while LICROX, with some others in this category, proposes artificial photosynthesis to convert solar energy, water and CO₂ into solar fuels. We invite you to take a closer look at these inspiring projects through the links.

Of course this is just a small selection of the incredible projects that we are following and as an example of the EIC hands-on activities, we will organize a series of workshops in the ‘solar energy conversion’ portfolio, gathering 17 projects (and over € 60 M budget) started in the last 3 years. We are confident that all the projects have the potential to really make a difference for a greener and climate-neutral future. If you would like to learn more about these and the many other projects the EIC supports in this area, but also in other fields such as health and digital technologies, please look at the Programme Managers webpage or EISMEA-D [dot] 02ec [dot] europa [dot] eu (get in touch with us directly).