Brussels (Brussels Morning) Last week, the European Parliament gave its final and emphatic approval to the new generation of Horizon Europe partnerships. They are nine in total and they constitute a key pillar of the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.
These investments total over 20 billion euro. At least half of them are supported by private partners. The funds are intended to address some of the main challenges Europe is facing right now, including digitisation, industry decarbonisation, health, biodiversity and circular economy, aviation and railways, among others. As I said, during the debate in Strasbourg, these partnerships are doors that open to our future.
As rapporteur, I was guided by the principles of openness, transparency and inclusion, which we want to be transversal to all of these partnerships. We want to strengthen the participation of small and medium-sized companies and start-ups. We want to streamline co-creation processes and we want to increase the proportion of innovative solutions that reach the market.
With those goals in mind, we sought to eliminate bureaucratic barriers, simplify processes, and create conditions for the possibility of synergies with other European and national programmes and funds.
We did all of this, not because we doubted the effectiveness of previous experiences of public-private partnerships, but precisely because we firmly believe that they represent one of the keys to achieving our great goals.
This new generation of partnerships has the potential to enable us to achieve two goals that must be pursued simultaneously: the vision of a greener and more environmentally friendly Europe, and the vision of a competitive Europe, creating jobs, creating wealth, capable of offering an increasingly better quality of life to all its citizens. We want a Europe better prepared to face health crises, natural disasters, and scarcity of resources.
A recent example came from Global Health, a partnership that brought together the EU and several African countries. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization announced that it had decided to recommend the widespread use of the first-ever malaria vaccine for children in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. This amazing breakthrough would have been impossible were it not for the role played Global Health.
Many, if not all of these initiatives have the potential to change lives. For example, in the field of mobility, we have the Clean Aviation partnership, which aims to develop the commercial aircraft of the future, with low levels of C02 emission. There are partnerships dealing with energy, in particular hydrogen, the circular economy, the digital, including 5G and 6G, as well as the production of microprocessors.
Ideas, knowledge and our innate ability to come up with concrete solutions, give us hope and comfort that we will overcome the enormous challenges that our planet and indeed humanity, face today.
Description of the partnerships
The nine partnerships, totalling about 20 bn euro, are funded by the EU budget, with matching contributions from industry. Primarily, they are roadmaps for innovation in each sector and fund projects that have an impact on the future direction of certain technologies.
The nine partnerships are:
• Circular Bio-based Europe
• Clean Aviation
• Clean Hydrogen
• Europe’s Rail
• Global Health EDCTP3
• Innovative Health Initiative
• Key Digital Technologies
• Single European Sky ATM Research 3
•Smart Networks and Services