MAIA: Connecting Climate Research for Positive Impact

MAIA: Connecting and Expanding Climate Research Impact

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the European Commission recognizes the importance of funding research and innovation (R&I) to address this challenge. However, despite the significant investments in R&I under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programs, the fragmentation of knowledge and lack of coordination among projects have resulted in limited reach, diffusion, and exploitation of research results.

The Interim Evaluation of Horizon 2020 report identified the need to create synergies between individual EU-funded climate change R&I activities through better coordination, complementarity, and coherence of research results. Moreover, the report highlighted that the lack of realistic business cases and exploitation strategies for project results has limited the true impact and cost-efficiency of previous EU R&I programs.

To address these issues, MAIA is a Horizon Europe project that aims to act as an impact multiplier of climate research projects funded under the Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 programs. MAIA brings together a carefully curated set of previous and ongoing Horizon 2020 projects concerning innovation for climate resilience to allow a broad audience to access their results.

MAIA aims to create an economic ecosystem and provide social and technological structures, along with an active outreach campaign to maximize the impact of climate research. The project will facilitate access to existing and emerging research results, including methods, tools, models, evidence, solutions, and knowledge platforms, supporting the actual exploitation of existing and new knowledge on climate change.

In this context, MAIA aims to make knowledge interoperable and usable by facilitating access to a broad range of audiences, including citizens, especially the youth. The project’s goal is to help individuals and stakeholders engage in participatory processes to understand actual hazards, potential scenarios, benefits of acting, and existing windows of opportunity.

With the MAIA consortium, we represent a strong, solid, and broad basis of previous and ongoing Horizon 2020 projects concerning climate resilience and adaptation innovations. Together, these successful European projects and resulting tools and platforms form a robust foundation for the coordination and support of new R&I initiatives.

MAIA aims to connect dispersed knowledge related to climate change and help expedite progress in reducing the climate vulnerability of Europe’s regions and communities while building their resilience. By doing so, MAIA contributes to the European Commission’s efforts to identify and activate synergies between the projects it funds through its framework programmes for R&I, ensuring the exploitation of research results to generate positive social, economic, and environmental impact.