TiCCA4DANU – Transformative Innovation for Climate Change Adaptation in the Danube Region

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TiCCA4Danu (Transformative Innovation for Climate Change Adaptation in the Danube Region) is an international research and innovation project under Horizon Europe that develops and tests a transformative innovation framework to accelerate just climate change adaptation (CCA) in Danube city‑regions. The project focuses on four “anchor cities” and their surrounding regions, representing different bio‑geographical settings in the Danube macro‑region (coastal, mountain and continental).

Funded by: Horizon Europe, co-funded by the European Union
Total eligible costs: €382,866.34​
Net EU contribution: €382,866.34​
Project duration: 36 months

Objective

TiCCA4Danu aims to remove structural barriers to climate change adaptation at city‑region level by applying a systems‑level Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) approach. The project links TIP with Local Green Deals and other local governance instruments to ensure that CCA is just, inclusive and aligned with broader EU climate and regional strategies.

Project approach

The project combines analytical work, experimentation and stakeholder engagement to co‑design adaptation pathways with public authorities, businesses, vulnerable groups and civil society. It tests novel governance models, policy mixes and financing approaches, aiming to upscale successful solutions through the EU Strategy for the Danube Region and EU‑wide dissemination events.

Pilot regions

TiCCA4Danu concentrates its activities on four anchor cities and their wider territories in the Danube macro‑region: Burgas and the surrounding Burgas District (Bulgaria), Debrecen and Hajdú‑Bihar County (Hungary), Maribor and the Podravje region (Slovenia), and Suceava and the Nord‑Est region (Romania), including links to neighbouring areas in Turkey and Ukraine. These demonstration territories allow the project to explore climate risks, adaptation options and governance innovations across different climatic and socio‑economic contexts.

Project partners

  • VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH (Coordinator), Berlin, Germany​
  • ICLEI European Secretariat GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany​
  • Stichting VU, Amsterdam, Netherlands​
  • Fondazione CMCC – Centro Euro‑Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Lecce, Italy​
  • Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria​
  • International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria​
  • ANTEJA ECG D.O.O., Ljubljana, Slovenia​
  • Obshtina Burgas (Burgas Municipality), Burgas, Bulgaria​
  • EDC Debrecen Város- és Gazdaságfejlesztési Központ Nonprofit Kft., Debrecen, Hungary​
  • Regionalna razvojna agencija za Podravje – Maribor (RRA Podravje – Maribor), Maribor, Slovenia​
  • Municipiul Suceava (Suceava Municipality), Suceava, Romania​
  • Lucia Seel International Consulting GmbH, Linz, Austria​
  • INFRAS AG, Zurich, Switzerland​
  • District Government Burgas, Burgas, Bulgaria​
  • Hajdú‑Bihar County Government, Debrecen, Hungary​
  • North East Regional Development Agency (ADR Nord‑Est), Piatra Neamț, Romania​
  • Odessa Regional State Administration, Ukraine​
  • Municipality of Uzunköprü, Turkey​

Useful links

Expansion and Deepening of Value Chains in Somalia: Supporting Women in Business

In Kismayo and Baidoa, women’s entrepreneurship relies largely on short-term humanitarian livelihood support. Limited access to finance, market information, skills and gender-responsive business services prevents women from growing their businesses. The GIZ project aims to improve women’s economic participation by strengthening women-led enterprises along selected value chains and improving the quality of entrepreneurship support services.

Anteja deepens up to four value chains, addressing technical, organisational and market bottlenecks. It trains local trainers as multipliers, with follow-up sessions and one-on-one mentoring, and facilitates linkages between suppliers, processors, vendors and consumers.

Project duration: June 2026 – February 2027
Region: Kismayo and Baidoa, Somalia

Client: GIZ

Headline photo: Pexels

Exploring the Potentials of Green Hydrogen for Local Economic Development

Connective Cities, implemented by GIZ, connects municipal practitioners from Germany and partner countries to initiate local reform measures. Its green hydrogen working group brings together municipalities from Sub-Saharan Africa and Germany to explore how renewable resources can supply local industries, create jobs and build a local hydrogen economy. The working group now focuses on concrete solutions, pilot measures and project applications. Anteja provides the technical steering, expertise and moderation of the working group. It moderates peer-learning workshops, organises expert missions and contributes to virtual insight sessions on good practice. It initiates and supervises short analyses, feasibility checks and pilot measures, including cooperation models between investors, companies and municipalities.

Project duration: May 2026 – July 2027
Region: Sub-Saharan Africa and Germany

Client: GIZ, Connective Cities

District-Level Pathways to Integrate Rural Women into Green and Sustainable Livelihoods in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

The assignment identified green value chains in which rural women can participate as workers and entrepreneurs, and defined the infrastructure, technology and financing needed to scale them. The findings inform the World Bank’s RIDP2 programme in Uzbekistan and its TWEEP and SERSP projects in Tajikistan.

Anteja screened and prioritised value chains by district and country. Fourteen strict reports propose financing instruments and feed the investment pipeline. An access-to-finance assessment shows where existing credit products suffice and where facilitation, capacity building or blended support is needed. Validation sessions with the World Bank and project implementation units aligned the pipeline and financing mechanisms with what programmes can implement in the near and longer term.

Project duration: February – September 2026
Region: Selected districts in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan

Client: The World Bank

Circular Economy in Biomass for Export Growth

SIPPO strengthens export competitiveness in developing and transition economies by upgrading business support organisations. Add the Tunisia context here: which biomass value chains, the partner organisation, and the export markets targeted. Anteja map value chains, identify waste-intensive nodes and prioritise circular interventions by their waste reduction potential. It assessed the proposed pathways against the EU Taxonomy and CSRD/ESRS and provided compliance checklists. It evaluated markets for circular products and mapped investment needs and indicative financing pathways to support bankability. Anteja trained business support organisations and SMEs on circular principles and KPIs, and ran targeted workshops with chambers, companies and other ecosystem actors. It advised on positioning circular products for EU buyers and trade promotion.

Project duration: April – May 2025
Region: Tunisia

Client: Swiss Import Promotion Programme (SIPPO), mandated by State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)

Improvement of the Export Promotion Service by Meeting ESG Sustainability Criteria

The assignment developed a self-assessment tool that measures how far Serbian SME suppliers meet ESG requirements under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The tool covers 18 ESG reporting criteria based on the voluntary SME standard (VSME ESRS exposure draft, November 2023) and guides companies on how to meet them. The project also built the capacity of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia (CCIS) to assess SME readiness for European green standards and to coach companies on sustainability.

Anteja designed a sustainability framework based on ESG, ESRS and CSRD requirements and developed a digital ESG self-assessment tool with automated reporting. It piloted the tool with SMEs, refined it and deployed it. Anteja trained CCIS staff in sustainability metrics, circular economy concepts and value chain assessment, and developed a coaching tool and questionnaire so that CCIS can coach SMEs and evaluate their compliance. The tools and methods were adapted so they can be scaled to other SIPPO countries.

Project duration: May 2023 – November 2024
Region: Serbia

Client: Swiss Import Promotion Programme (SIPPO), mandated by State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)

EU Interreg GoDanubio

Participative ecosystems to foster the revitalization of rural-urban cooperation through governing circular bioeconomy in the Danube regions and cities.

Project duration:

Project start date: 01-07-2020

Project end date: 31-12-2022

Funding/Budget

Overall: 2713796.5 EUR

ERDF Contribution: 2214155.21 EUR

IPA Contribution: 92571.8 EUR

ENI Contribution: 0 EUR

Danube regions and cities face major societal transitions regarding demographic change. The rural exodus is caused by better employment opportunities for the youth and the prospect of a better life in cities. The movement of labor leads to depopulated areas leaving an aging and increasingly unskilled population behind. However, regions can make a significant new beginning. But a multi-level participative governance approach and new institutional capacities are needed to pool existent excellent competencies and development potentials.

Co-creating future strategies to increase the attractiveness of rural areas is the key to give the youth new incentives to revive rural areas. Circular bioeconomy is used as a tool that promises to foster regional development: It is a concept focusing on the transition of a fossil-resource based economy towards an economy making use of sustainable production of biological resources and processes to develop new products, thus setting rural areas and their development into focus.

The concept catalyzes interdisciplinary cooperation also between different policy areas/levels to actively address demographic change, by enhancing value creation through new collaboration, business models and value chains raising the attractiveness to stay and even move to rural areas.

Long term goal of the project is to enhance the socio-economic status of the regions, contribute to environmental, climate and resource protection as well as foster development of rural areas. An ecosystem for systematic multi-level governance with actors from the interested public, academia, industry and political decision making will be developed.

That ecosystem gives space for co-creation and new forms of integrated urban-rural cooperation leading to increased institutional capacity to tackle demographic change. Thus, overcoming the persistent lack of engagement of societal actors in the political system by giving them ownership to address demographic change.

Project website

EU Interreg ARDIA-Net

EU Interreg ARDIA-Net
Developing an Alpine Space Research, Development and Innovation by lowering barriers for cross-regional cooperation.

Project duration

Project start date: 1.10.2019

Project end date: 30.6.2022

Funding/Budget

Total eligible costs: 1.591.414 EUR

ERDF grant: 1.169.952 EUR

Ardia-Net aims to develop a multilevel, multinational and coherent Alpine RDI Area for cross-regional and interdisciplinary cooperation and implement a joint funding framework and pilot projects, addressing circular bioeconomy and health economy megatrends.

ARDIA-Net project is led by BIOPRO Baden-Wurttemberg and involves 7 other partners located in 6 different Alpine regions. ARDIA-Net tackles a common challenge to many Alpine Space (AS) regions: the excellent AS innovation hot spots operate in a disconnected way since there is a lack of a multilevel transnational governance for a cross-regional S3 approach. S3 across the AS relies on existing capacities in relevant priority areas, such as digitization, agro-food, health, materials, which represent huge synergy potentials at cross-regional level. For this reason, actors should cooperate transnationally along the value chains to have an impact and implement the macro-regional strategies, such as EUSALP.

The challenge is to create a Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) area which, other than the Interreg-program, addresses the regions’ specific interest in synchronizing and funding joint activities across regions. This can lead to a mutual benefit for the alpine regions, through a smart connection of S3.

Furthermore, the improvement of the macroregional cooperation can significantly enhance the growth of new cross-sectoral value chains in the fields of circular bioeconomy and health economy, which are based on critical mass of actors and investments.

ARDIA-Net aims to develop a multilevel, multinational and coherent Alpine RDI Area for cross-regional and interdisciplinary cooperation and implement a joint funding framework and pilot projects addressing CBH megatrends. Regional S3 are aligned through synergy diamonds developed in the S3-4AlpClusters project, allowing the identification of mutual benefits, highest potential for innovative products and services related to CBH and contributing to common EUSALP priorities (eg. advanced manufacturing or eHealth).

ARDIA-Net’s partnership is actively involved in regional policy deployment and is composed of actors of new CBH value chains. It allows the efficient synchronization of RDI calls, the alignment of relevant actors, leading to hands-on innovative projects covering entire new CBH value chains, from research to market. ARDIA will result in a ready-to-use funding environment and innovation beacons for future cooperation in S3-implementation.

Project’s website

EU Interreg AlpLinkBioEco

Linking bio-based industry value chains across the Alpine region

Duration
Start date: 16.4.2018
End date: 16.4.2021

Funding/Budget
Total eligible costs: 2,036.020 EUR
ERDF grant: 1,730.617 EUR

A missing holistic transnational/regional approach in the Alpine Space causes existing actors in the bio-based economy to operate disjointed. Relevant clusters operate disconnected, important value chains are not established especially for producing high value applications and products that address critical societal needs: circular economy, environmental sustainability, local employment and quality of life. As the Alpine Space regions possess huge biomass resources and the necessary knowledge and technology to use them in sectors such as green chemicals, biopolymers or bio-based materials, Alpine Space competitiveness potential remains then untapped.

AlpLinkBioEco created a cross Alpine Space circular bio-based strategy, establishing awareness, assessing, selecting and creating transnational/regional new value chains connecting all relevant actors, and demonstrating the implementation of successful business opportunities.

Main results of the AlpLinkBioEco project are:

1. Value Chain Generator Tool

The Value Chain Generator (VCG) Tool is one of the main outputs of AlpLinkBioEco and it has been developed by the Institute of Complex Systems, School of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg (HES-SO//FR HEIA-FR).

It is a software that allows to match actors from different sectors and countries to create novel bio-based value chains and it has been tested and successfully exploited by the project partners for this purpose during the project. Both intra-regional as well as cross-regional new business opportunities can be envisaged if data is shared, as it was the case during the project. The primary users of the VCG are the stakeholders of innovation ecosystems, companies, researchers, policymakers, but also cluster managers. New users are invited to join, since the source code of the VCG software is available under a permissive software license.

VCG website

2. Joint Masterplan on circular bio-based economy

The Masterplan collects inputs, resources and assets analyzed through the AlpLinkBioEco Project and gives valuable recommendations to boost the definition of a joint bioeconomy strategy in the Alpine Region.

Project’s website

AlpLinkBioEco – Creating BioBased Value in the Alpine Space (2021)

AlpLinkBioEco – Joint Masterplan on circular bioeconomy (March 2021)

EU Interreg S3-4AlpClusters

Multiple countries’ effort to enable the Alpine regions to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth of economically viable activities.

Duration:
Start date: 1.11.2016
End date: 30.4.2019

Funding/Budget
Total eligible costs: 2.521.964 EUR
ERDF grant: 1.929.500 EUR

The S3-fAlpClusters project enhanced smart industrial transition in the Alpine regions through the interplay between clusters and Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3).

The Smart Specialisation concept is an integral part of the EU Cohesion Policy. Several EU regions have developed their Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3). The challenge is to implement S3 through clusters. In the Alpine Space, the implementation of S3 by clusters and cluster organizations can offer an innovative approach for improving innovation capacity.
Cross-regional approaches can serve to support coordinated actions between different sectors or regions. Transnational cluster cooperation helps to achieve a critical mass of SMEs and enhances cross-regional collaboration in relevant Alpine Space areas.

The activities of fourteen project partners included:
– exchanges of information and knowledge among political decision-makers from different regions of the Alpine region, including business, academics and civil society
– facilitation of innovation through cluster initiatives (innovation groups) across the Alpine Space with a strong technological orientation and a high degree of complementarity between the clusters
– cluster-to-cluster cooperation involving all relevant stakeholders: regional political bodies, academic institutions, business and civil society.

Project’s website

Final publication

Bersier J., Keller M. (2019. Smart Specialisation Strategies with Smart Clusters. S3-4AlpClusters.