Horizon Europe is well underway, but the world of European R&D policy goes well beyond the confines of the €95.5 billion R&D programme. EU climate, digital, agriculture and regional policies all have significant research and innovation components. National governments often come up with new R&D policies, decide to fund new research avenues, and set up international cooperation deals. This blog aims to keep you informed on all of that and more.
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The EU and Thailand signed the a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) at the ASEAN summit on 14 December in Brussels.
The agreement is aimed at strengthening bilateral relations and cooperation on environment, science and technology, climate change, energy, transport, trade, agriculture and other policy areas.
"The EU and Thailand are committed to working together in support of the rules-based international order as well as to advancing regional prosperity and stability,” said the EU High Representative Josep Borrell.
Before entering into force, the PCA must be ratified by EU member states and Thailand.
The EU and Singapore are set to sign off a new cross-cutting digital partnership early next year, the European Commission has announced.
Cooperation areas will include trade facilitation, trusted data flows and data innovation, digital trust, standards, digital skills for workers, and the digital transformation of businesses and public services.
The new partnership is expected to help make supply chains more resilient and advance efforts on developing new technologies such as 5G/6G, artificial intelligence and digital identities.
A new report by the European Commission maps out the potential for cooperation with southeast Asian countries on high performance computing.
The report was released this week, as the EU meets the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for a commemorative summit. It lays out existing facilities and capacities and considers setting up a joint roadmap for activities between the two regions in this strategic area for science.
“At today’s #euasean Commemorative Summit we explored ways to work even closer in the future,” tweeted EU research commissioner Mariya Gabriel.
EU companies' investments in R&D increased by 8,9% in 2021, after a 2,2% drop in 2020 due to the consequences of the COVID crisis, according to this year’s industrial R&D investment scoreboard.
According to the report, the EU remains a global leader in R&D investments in the automotive sector, thanks to the shift towards electric and connected vehicles.
The scoreboard provides economic and financial information based on 2,500 companies investing the largest sums in R&D in the world, including the top 1,000 companies based in the EU.
Globally, private R&D investment grew by 14.8% in 2021, beyond pre-pandemic levels. For the first time since the 2004 scoreboard, total R&D investment by the world's top 2,500 firms passed above €1 trillion.
Four key sectors account for more than 75% of the total private R&D investment reported globally: ICT products (22.6%), health industries (21.5%), ICT services (19.8%) and the car industry (13.9%).
Canada is aiming to become a global leader in supplying critical minerals to boost green transition sectors after its government launched a new C$3.8 billion critical minerals strategy.
It is looking to capitalise on the fact that the country possesses many of the world’s critical minerals, such as lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, and rare earth elements. These six minerals have been set as the initial priority by the government for exploitation.
Jonathan Wilkinson, minister of natural resources, said that these minerals can be the “building blocks for the green and digital economy”.
“There is no energy transition without critical minerals: no batteries, no electric cars, no wind turbines and no solar panels,” he wrote in a foreword introducing the strategy.
The government also hopes that extracting critical minerals will drive the economy and create hundreds of thousands of jobs in industry- and technology-based sectors.
The UK government has today announced a £178 million plan to invest in genomics research with the aim of speeding up diagnoses of rare genetic diseases in newborns, improving the speed of cancer diagnoses and bolstering the country’s technological capacities in life sciences.
The plan includes a £105 million investment into researching genome sequencing, which the government hopes will allow for better and faster treatment of genetic diseases in newborns.
An initial £26 million will be set aside for a programme that involves using genomic sequencing technology to improve the accuracy and speed of diagnosis for cancer patients. A further £22 million will go towards studying 25,000 research participants of non-European ancestry to improve understanding of DNA and its impact on health. Finally, £25 million will go towards studying functional genomics.
Minister for health Will Quince said: “Genomics is changing the future of healthcare and this plan is a crucial next step in delivering our vision to create the most advanced genomic healthcare system in the world.”
The UK is hoping to spur growth in low-emission, resource-efficient foods through a new £16 million investment fund set up by the government’s innovation agency Innovate UK in partnership with the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
The hope is to attract projects looking to develop new food production systems that can turn out healthy food with a low environmental impact.
Lee Beniston, associate director for industry partnerships and collaboration at BBSRC, said the call would help to develop alternative, more sustainable protein sources.
“This will help to ensure the UK continues to be at the forefront of what is an innovative and rapidly evolving sector in the UK and globally.
The competition is set to open on 18 January 2023. Read here for more information.
The European Commission and the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) have signed an InvestEU guarantee agreement worth up to €114 million.
The agreement will unlock NIB financing of up to €480 million for investments in sustainable infrastructure, research, innovation and digitalisation across the Nordic and Baltic countries, as well as in Poland.
NIB will use the InvestEU guarantee to mobilise investments in clean energy, critical raw materials, and the development of innovative technologies across a range of sectors.
UK minister for maritime and industry Nusrat Ghani has announced £45 million in funding to maintain the country’s fleet of research vessels.
Maintenance and upgrades will be carried out on RRS Sir David Attenborough, RRS Discovery, and RRS James Cook. These three ships are being used for oceanic and arctic research, enabling scientists to study climate change and pollution.
“This research is invaluable, which is why we are committing the funding needed for the upkeep of these key research vessels,” said Ghani.
A new survey is calling for ideas on how a range of future trends - from the hydrogen economy to the "transhumanist revolution" - should impact the design of Horizon Europe in 2025-7.
This Commission foresight project, called Research4Futures, is crowdsourcing ideas to inform Horizon's next strategic plan.
In light of a series of trends expected before 2040, the survey is asking respondents how EU R&I policy should respond, and whether the framework programme is important to managing the disruption.
The 11 areas it is soliciting opinions on are: artificial intelligence; climate change; converging technologies and ecosystems; crime and the economy; emerging global commons; geopolitical reconfigurations; health challenges; hydrogen economy; rising societal confrontations; resource crises; and transhumanist revolutions.
The survey is found here.
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