Horizon 2020 projects
Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics

By overcoming present technical, economic, governance and social barriers to restoration upscaling, REST-COAST will develop the large-scale river-coast connectivity and increase the nearshore accommodation space for the resilient delivery of coastal ecosystem services (ESS). The selected ESS (risk reduction, environmental quality and fish provisioning) touch urgent coastal problems such as the erosion/flooding during recent storms or the accelerating coastal habitat degradation that seriously affects fisheries and aquaculture. By enhancing these ESS under present and future climates at 9 Pilots that represent the main EU regional seas (Baltic, Black, North, Atlantic and Mediterranean) we shall increase the commitment of citizens, stakeholders and policy makers for a long-term maintenance of restoration. Such commitment will go together with a transformation of governance and financial structures, supported by evidence-based results on restoration benefits for the welfare of coastal societies and assets. This transformation will build upon the results from hands-on restoration at the Pilots, steered by the multidisciplinary project advances.
Within the REST-COAST project, UNIVE will participate in the review of indicators useful to monitor the performance of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services benefits for the Venice lagoon pilot, and in the identification of opportunities for the scaling up and out of coastal restoration activities (WP1). Moreover, UNIVE will apply environmental risk assessment approaches for assessing the impact of climate change and other anthropic pressures on water quality and related ecosystem services (WP2). Finally, UNIVE will analyse and compare the performance of selected NBS measures in the Venice Pilot areal, to support the design of a methodology for NBS upscaling (WP4).

MYRIAD-EU (Multi-hazard and sYstemic framework for enhancing Risk-Informed mAnagement and Decision-making in the EU) is an EU-Horizon2020 funded project started in September 2021 that will run until 2025. It is conducted in collaboration with 17 partners from research institutes, NGOs, industry, and stakeholder representatives from all over Europe.
MYRIAD-EU’s vision is to catalyse the paradigm shift required to move towards a multi-risk, multi-sector, systemic approach to risk management. Our aim is that by the end of MYRIAD-EU policy-makers, decision-makers, and practitioners can develop forward-looking disaster risk management pathways that assess trade-offs and synergies across sectors, hazards, and scales.
UNIVE will develop risk analysis approaches based on machine learning methods for the assessment of environmental risks associated with the collection of water resources and climate change in the Veneto Region, in collaboration with the partner CMCC (Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change).

The aims of the European Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Core project are:

• Retrieve a continuous ice core to bedrock in Antarctica, covering the climate history of the Mid Pleistocene Transition and beyond (1.5 million years), where glacial/interglacial cycles changed from a 40,000 to a 100,000 year cyclicity.
• Derive first high-resolution climate and CO2 records over the time interval older than 700,000 BP.
• Use the new climate records to constraint the cause of the MPT and long-term carbon cycle-climate feedbacks.

The optimal drill site, identified with geophysical surveys, is located at Little Dome C, 40 km away from Concordia Station at Dome C (3233 m a.s.l.), the Italian-French base on the high East Antarctic Plateau.

REACHOUT is a H2020 project with the aim to advance Climate Services for urban environments in 7 City Hubs across Europe, developing adaptation strategies integrated in climate resilient urban development.
The prime objective of REACHOUT is to bridge the last mile in climate service delivery to better support all European cities in building resilience to climate change by a pragmatic approach that builds upon existing achievements and addresses main barriers for uptake.
REACHOUT project builds next level climate services that supports adaptation decision making in 7 City Hubs. These hubs serve as living labs for co-creation of the services with government, citizens and the private sector and serve as accelerators for further regional and national upscaling of the use of these services. The hubs represent a regionally diverse portfolio of climate vulnerabilities and adaptation needs across stakeholders. In each hub REACHOUT has a direct beneficiary partner that has already internalized adaptation planning and has strong institutional connections and relationships with other municipalities, towns and organizations in their periphery. To ensure sustainability beyond the lifetime of the project close cooperates with existing climate service platforms and develops business models for implementation of the services from the start.

The goal of the RePAIR project is to develop a ground-breaking technology to virtually eliminate one of the most labour-intensive and frustrating steps in archaeological research, namely the physical reconstruction of shattered artworks. By developing and integrating novel technologies in the fields of robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence, we envisage a future where archaeology can deal effectively with reconstruction problems at an unprecedented scale and be able to bring back to life ancient artworks and masterpieces which would otherwise remain broken into pieces forever. Specifically, we aim to develop an intelligent robotic system which will autonomously process, match and physically assemble large fractured artefacts at a fraction of the time it takes humans to do. Our system will be tested over iconic case studies from the UNESCO World Heritage site of Pompeii, and one tangible outcome of the project will be to restore two world-renowned frescos which are now shattered into thousands of fragments and forgotten in storerooms.

The four-year SUNSHINE European project aims at developing and validating Safe by Sustainable Design (S&SbD) strategies for products that incorporate multi-component nanomaterials (there are already over 1000 on the market), to facilitate their implementation on an industrial scale. This will involve studying the potential impacts on both the synthesis processes and on the performance of the final product, as well as the potential risks to human health and the environment over the entire life cycle.
The S&SbD strategies, which will be based on methods such as doping, coating, surface passivation and functionalization of the selected products, will be validated through specific case studies, including the construction, agri-food, medical, energy and automotive sectors. The most effective strategies in reducing risks along the entire life cycle of the targeted products, while ensuring product performance and economic feasibility, will therefore be proposed for implementation on an industrial scale.

The EMERGE project aims to comprehensively quantify and evaluate the effects of several potential emission reduction technologies for shipping in Europe and provide recommendations and guidance on the most suitable, effective and cost-beneficial options to significantly reduce marine pollution. This activity will include the collection of experimental data and the development of an integrated modelling framework to assess the combined impacts on the aquatic and atmospheric environments of air emissions and waste streams of ships equipped with several potential emission control technologies.

What was daily life like in the European Bronze Age? In contrast to large-scale narratives based on artefacts, often prestige items from funerary contexts, this project focuses on the practices of daily domestic life, recorded in the sediments upon which it took place. These constitute the domestic stratigraphic record. This project, therefore, shifts the scale and the object of archaeological investigation, and aims at bringing interdisciplinary scientific analyses into dialogue with anthropological understandings of lifeways and households. Its main objective is the formulation of an innovative narrative of the Bronze Age addressing social, economic, and environmental aspects of a culturally interconnected region of Europe. The daily practices and life histories of bronze age people will be the pixels of this new picture that challenges previous depersonalized narratives relying on material culture. The region between the Carpatho-Danubian basin, the Balkans, and northern Italy was selected due to its important cultural interactions during the Bronze Age. Ten key archaeological sites in six European countries constitute the project’s database. Its innovative interdisciplinary approach integrates geoarchaeology (micro-stratigraphic analysis), organic chemistry (biomarkers) and archaeo-botany (phytoliths, seeds, fruits, and charcoal) to reconstruct with unprecedented accuracy the daily practices from domestic stratigraphy. This information will be compared with the story told by material culture and integrated with local paleo-environmental records. The project, in fact, challenges also previous reconstructions that called in environmental mega-events (volcanic eruptions, glacial advances, aridity events) to aprioristically explain broad cultural phenomena of the Bronze Age. Their inherent complexity can only be faced by crystallizing detailed micro-histories and site-specific environmental reconstructions into a broader synthesis based on hard scientific data.

The Last Interglacial (125 000 years ago) was the last period of the Earth’s history when climate was slightly warmer than pre-industrial. During the Last Interglacial, ice sheets were smaller and global mean sea level was higher than today. For this reason, this period of time represents a process-analog for future warming. Sea level and ice sheets dynamics during the Last Interglacial period are often regarded as indicators for the sensitivity of ice sheets to future melting. However, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of last interglacial sea level and extreme waves, that we aim to fill with WARMCOASTS. 
Specifically, we will concentrate on three main research goals:

1. Advancing current knowledge of last interglacial global mean sea level and associated uncertainties
2. Investigating the existence and pattern of sea level fluctuations within interglacials
3. Test the hypothesis that last interglacial extreme wave events were stronger than today.

The period from the 6^th- to 11^th- century in Italy is one of the most profound political and social laboratories in European history. Centred on this region and period, the In&Around project aims at exploring the interaction between climate variability and human agency with a lens towards the management of the environment and in the light of shifting political regimes. By way of the innovation-through-interdisciplinary approach, it combines new long-duration and high-resolution climate records from recently cored lake sediments in Central Italy with data derived from written sources and already extant climate reconstructions, thus offering an important contribution to an expanding field of study, and capturing details on past issues of contemporary significance, like climate change, human mobility and workforce relocation.

The PIONEER project will develop innovative low-cost quantitative analytical methods for the assessment of air pollution in remote areas, focusing on tropospheric ozone. The aim of the project is the development of a low-cost sensor network for the study of transboundary transport phenomena of pollutants crossing the Eastern Alps. The project will be developed with the University of Berkeley and with the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences of the CNR of Bologna, under the supervision of Prof. Carlo Barbante at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice.