Commission announces initial call results

The European Commission has announced the first results of three calls under the Societal Challenges pillars that closed last week.

The first stage of the €104m ‘Sustainable food security’ call closed last week and the EU institution has revealed that 357 proposals across the ten research topics, including ‘Strategies for crop productivity, stability and quality’, ‘Consolidating the environmental sustainability of European aquaculture’ and ‘Tackling malnutrition in the elderly’.

Initial results have also been released for the ‘Blue growth: unlocking the potential of seas and oceans’ call, worth €36m. The Commission received 59 proposals for the call, which is spread across three research topics. The division was 13 proposals for the ‘Improving the preservation and sustainable exploitation of Atlantic marine ecosystems’ topic; 17 proposals for ‘Forecasting and anticipating effects of climate change on fisheries and aquaculture’; and 29 proposals for ‘Response capacities to oil spills and marine pollutions’.

Finally, the number of proposals submitted to the ‘Innovative, sustainable and inclusive bioeconomy’ has been released as 97 proposals across three topics, namely ‘Unlocking the growth potential of rural areas through enhanced governance and social innovation’, which received 46 proposals; ‘Improved forest management models’, which obtained 17 proposals; and ‘Converting CO₂ into chemicals’, which collected 34 proposals.

The Commission has said that the evaluation procedure of all three calls will run from 23 February to 13 March 2015, and a stage two-submission deadline has been set for 11 June 2015.