Tulanet organized an event Green Deal in Horizon 2020 to generate joint ideas for Tulanet collaboration, and to prepare for the opening Green Deal call. The event was chaired by Research Director Eeva Primmer from the Finnish Evironment Institute, SYKE. In this blog she shares her ideas about Tulanet’s strengths and opportunities to succeed in the upcoming call.
Tulanet organisations work in a solutions-oriented fashion, which is exactly what the Green Deal call is about. Solutions should be developed, tested, demonstrated and upscaled. They should really move from the scientists’ notepad to new administrative, industrial, commercial and consumer practices, and be transferred to new substance areas.
The keynote speaker in our Tulanet event, Director of IIIEE, Lund University, Per Mickwitz, highlighted the greenness in the Green Deal and the H2020 call. The call mobilizes research funds to implement the European Green Deal, as one core instrument for advancing sustainability transition. The other presenters, Jaana Halonen from THL and Marko Tainio from SYKE as well as Raisa Mäkipää from Luke added to this notion, by recognizing a strong systems orientation and a need for taking justice considerations onboard. The Green Deal has a strong commitment to change that goes beyond scientific impact. It seeks to genuinely change the society toward more sustainable.
As Tulanet represents research institutes, each under a sector ministry, we have a strong science-policy-practice orientation. We have always sought to generate impact with our research, and already in the previous Horizon 2020 calls, this has been our competitive advantage. Tulanet team leaders and researchers are experienced in co-development with knowledge users. With different Tulanet organisations having different end-users, we still have ample opportunities to further learn from each other.
Tulanet organizations have worked a lot together, in various expert advice roles, and also in research. Yet, this has been mostly with national funding. The opening call and its systemic approach give us an opportunity to share the Finnish trans-disciplinary approach with European colleagues, and do this in a Tulanet collaboration. The seminar triggered some calls for joining forces.
As a Finnish national research institutes collaborative partnership, Tulanet has gathered and collated the partnership’s comments, so that they would come as a stronger statement. This influencing role should also be supported alongside our research work. The European Green Deal offers us a wonderful opportunity to fulfill this mandate.
Eeva Primmer, SYKE
The presentations from the event are available here.