The European Commission meets the BEERI to strengthen collaboration and open dialogue

Excellent first meeting between the European Commission and the Board of European Environmental Research Infrastructures: enhanced synergies, a fortified dialogue and concrete outcomes are expected at the end of the year.

The first of a series of meetings between the European Commission and the Board of European Environmental Research Infrastructures (BEERI) took place on 6.7.2022. These meetings are part of an overall effort from the Commission to increase the representation of scientific research clusters among European institutions and reinforce interinstitutional dialogue. This kick-off meeting gathered together Apostolia Karamali (Head of Unit), Agnès Robin (Policy Officer) from the DG RTD of the European Commission, Jean-Marie Flaud (chair of the Environment Strategy Working Group of ESFRI), expert advisers to the Commission, as well as representatives of nine out of the twenty-six European environmental research infrastructures part of the ENVRI Community.

The meeting confirmed the BEERI as the European Commission’s main partner for a dialogue with the environmental cluster. “As many ENVRIs are becoming operational, we need to launch the next phase of cooperation with the European Commission and ESFRI”, says Werner L. Kutsch, ICOS ERIC Director General and the BEERI chair. “The focus may change from implementing to using ENVRIs in research and beyond in serving our societies to solve urgent environmental challenges.”

As the 2023 mid-term review of the Multiannual Financial Framework set by the Commission approaches, there is a stronger pressure on European research infrastructures to provide as many operational services as possible, while structural and operational challenges are still affecting the ENVRI Community. The BEERI addressed five main working points during the meeting:

  • Adaptation of the ERIC status to the operational goals of distributed ENVRIs While ENVRIs should cover the entire European continent, under the current ERIC status distributed RIs can only cover countries members of the ERIC. This means in practice that each Member State of the EU should eventually be a member of all the ERICs, pausing a serious challenge.

  • Additional effort to achieve a full digitalisation of the ENVRIs Huge progress has been achieved in the digitalisation of the environmental RIs under FAIR and Open data principles, aiming at an EOSC integration. The development of remaining digitalised services will nonetheless require additional funding and continuous support for the cluster and its coordinating activities.

  • Developing new services with high societal impact to address key challenges The ENVRI Community positively welcomed the proposition of the European Commission to develop new shared services with a high societal impact, provided that a clear framework would be established and that dedicated funding would be provided.

  • Increasing the synergy between the ENVRI Community and Copernicus The ENVRI Community is ready and willing to increase its involvement in Copernicus beyond data provision, provided that a catalogue of needs is established along with a panorama of the possible funding schemes to address them.

  • Strengthening the ENVRIs role in global networks The ENVRI Community is internationally very well connected because of the global nature of the environmental challenges. This could be further improved by the establishment of specific calls for international cooperation harmonised with the main funding actors at the global level. The Horizon Europe Partnerships or other schemes should be used, provided the activities are tightly coordinated between all the international funders.

  • Increasing the synergy between the European Commission and the ENVRI Community The European Commission should make more use of the ENVRI Community to support its actions in the global framework like UNFCCC, UNCBD, Sendai Framework, GEO… Many ENVRIs are observers to these organizations and deliver scientific advice that could be better channelled to support the Commission.

These points were examined thoroughly during the meeting and will serve as milestones for upcoming discussions between the European Commission and the representatives of the European environmental cluster. For that purpose, a position paper from the ENVRI Community is expected for mid-September, aiming at achieving concrete outcome deliveries at the end of the year.