UK scientist Dr Nils Bunnefeld, of the University of Stirling, Scotland, has received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to investigate how humans and wildlife can successfully co-exist. The five-year, £1.1m (~€1.4m), international ConFooBio project aims to solve the conflict between the parties promoting biodiversity conservation and ensuring food security by producing a new model to both predict and resolve these conflicts. “Each year governments across the world pay out millions of pounds in compensation to farmers for crops destroyed by birds and mammals. In developing countries an entire community’s annual crops can be ruined overnight by elephants, and there is an ongoing debate on the importance to economies of producing farmed salmon at the expense of preserving wild salmon,” says Bunnefeld. “These conflicts are difficult to resolve; even at the highest levels there is usually a winner and a loser, and in many cases negotiations are stalled. Creating a process that achieves a positive resolution for all the parties involved is our goal. We will do this by using our existing expertise, extensive field research, as well as combining for the first time a range of academic approaches from social sciences, economics and ecology.” Bunnefeld and his team will set up research bases to examine communities as diverse as Gabon, central Africa; Norway; Sweden; Denmark; and Orkney, Scotland, with the hope of producing outcomes that protect both livelihoods and wildlife. Drivers for the research include the increasing impact of climate change, mitigating conflicts between food production and biodiversity, increasing the economic benefits of tourism and ensuring the protection of endangered species. The created model will be used by such agencies as the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and Scottish Natural Heritage. The post ConFooBio resolving human-wildlife food conflicts appeared first on Horizon 2020 Projects.

Stakeholders are invited to have their say on which climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials challenges should be tackled in the Horizon 2020 Work Programme for 2018-2020. Until 8 April, all those interested can participate in a stakeholder consultation in preparation for the next work programme for Societal Challenge (SC) 5 (‘Climate Action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials’), which has been allocated a budget of around €1bn for 2018-2020. According to the European Commission, research and innovation within this challenge aim to ‘achieve a resource – and water – efficient and climate change resilient economy and society, the protection and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems, and a sustainable supply and use of raw materials, in order to meet the needs of a growing global population within the sustainable limits of the planet’s natural resources and eco-system’. Stakeholders are invited to respond to five questions citing any available evidence such as foresight and other assessments of research and innovation trends and market opportunities. The questions are: 1) What are the challenges in the areas of Societal Challenge 5 that require action under the Work Programme 2018-2020? Would they require an integrated approach across the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges and Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies?; 2) What is the output/impact that could be foreseen? Which innovation aspects could reach (market) deployment within five to seven years?; 3) Which gaps (in science and technology, innovation, markets, policy, financing and governance, regulation etc.) and potential game changers, including the role of the public sector in accelerating changes, need to be taken into account?; 4) Which areas could benefit from integration of horizontal aspects such as social sciences and humanities, responsible research and innovation, gender aspects, international cooperation?; and 5) In view of the recent evolution of the socioeconomic and policy context, what are the emerging priorities for Societal Challenge 5? See the commission website for more information on the challenge, and submit your ideas via email to take part. The post Have your say on SC 5: Climate action appeared first on Horizon 2020 Projects.

European Commission investments in TB vaccine R&D through the Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (TBVI) and its partners have resulted in six TB vaccines currently being evaluated in clinical trials. Making up almost 50% of the vaccine candidates of the current global clinical pipeline for TB vaccines, these investments have strengthened European excellence and leadership in the TB vaccine R&D arena. A key factor in producing these results has been partnerships that focus on knowledge development and early data sharing. The recent TBVI annual meeting (including the TBVAC2020 meeting and the TBVI symposium) in Les Diablerets, Switzerland, from 2-5 February 2016 was another demonstration of this effective partnership in action. With 167 participants representing 58 research institutes, universities, industries, SMEs, funding agencies, technical agencies and partner organisations from both inside and outside the EU, the latest results and achievements from the EC-funded TBVAC2020 project were shared. The meeting also brought the TBVAC2020 consortium members together with other EU H2020 projects on TB vaccines. The TBVAC2020 project meeting provided the first results of R&D activities, including vaccine discovery and biomarkers of immunity and protection. During the vaccine discovery session, updates were provided on novel subunits as potential vaccine candidates and on genetically engineered live mycobacterial candidates including attenuated M. tuberculosis mutants, and new delivery strategies were presented. Partners in the establishment of the global portfolio advisory committee explained strategies to support the global effort towards the development of improved TB vaccine regimen. During the correlates of protection session, promising diagnostic biomarkers were presented with the potential to discriminate active TB from latently infected individuals, as well as promising correlates of risk of developing TB. These markers/correlates allow for targeted interventions and risk stratification of cohorts for clinical studies. The executive director of TBVI and the chair of the TBVAC2020 project announced that two new industry partners, GSK and Transgene SA, are joining the TBVAC2020 consortium. This partnership brings complementary expertise and adds another dynamic to the consortium, contributing to the diversification of new vaccine candidates through the vaccine pipeline. Horizon2020projects.com first reported TBVI’s Horizon 2020 funding award back in January 2015. The post TB vaccine R&D accelerated through partnership appeared first on Horizon 2020 Projects.

Researchers in the UK and France have described a new physical mechanism that separates particles according to their size during the drying of wet coatings. Their discovery could help to improve the performance of a wide variety of everyday goods. When coatings with different sized particles, e.g. paints, dry, the smaller particles come together to push away larger ones, creating ‘self-layering’ coatings, researchers at the University of Surrey, UK, and Université Claude Bernard, Lyon, France, found. This mechanism can be used to control the properties at the top and bottom of coatings independently, which could help to improve the performance of coatings across industries as diverse as beauty and pharmaceuticals. “When coatings such as paint, ink or even outer layers on tablets are made, they work by spreading a liquid containing solid particles onto a surface, and allowing the liquid to evaporate,” explains lead author Dr Andrea Fortini of the University of Surrey. “This is nothing new, but what is exciting is that we’ve shown that during evaporation, the small particles push away the larger ones, remaining at the top surface whilst the larger are pushed to bottom. This happens naturally.” He adds that this type of self-layering could be used in sunscreen to make most of the sunlight-blocking particles push their way to the top, leaving particles that can adhere to the skin near the bottom of the coating. The researchers are now working to understand how to control the width of the layers by changing the type and amount of small particles in a coating. They also hope to explore the use of layers in industrial products such as paints, inks and adhesives. The funding for this work comes from BARRIERPLUS, a Seventh Framework Programme aimed at the reduction of environmentally damaging volatile organic compounds in paints. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The post New understanding into how coatings dry appeared first on Horizon 2020 Projects.