Overview
The overall goal of the proposed Cofund is to strengthen the European Research Area (ERA) in maritime and marine technologies and Blue Growth. The realisation of a European research and innovation agenda needs a broad and systematic cooperation in all areas of waterborne transport, offshore activity, marine resources, maritime security, biotechnologies, desalination, offshore oil & gas, fisheries, aquaculture etc. covering all relevant maritime and marine sectors and regions for a sustainable development of the maritime sector. Research and innovation activities in these fields cannot be tackled either at national levels alone, or solely by a single sector. Coordinated actions are required for the maritime industry to strengthen Europe’s position in this important and complex economic field in a global market. The proposing consortium will organise and co-fund, together with the EU, a joint call for trans-national research projects on different thematic areas of Blue Growth. Furthermore, additional joint activities that go beyond this co-funded call are planned, in order to contribute to the national priorities as well as to the Strategic Research Agenda of JPI Oceans and WATERBORNE. With the cooperation of ERA-NET MARTEC and JPI Oceans, a broader variety of topics with a larger amount of funding will be available for the trans-national projects. Moreover, the focus of development in MarTERA is given to technologies (instead of sectors) due to their potentially large impact to a wide range of application fields.
The proposal responds to the topic ERA-NET Cofund on marine technologies of the work programme 2016-2017 of the societal challenge 2 (Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime and inland water research and the bio-economy) under Horizon 2020. Thereby it also contributes to the overall EU objective of building the ERA through enhanced cooperation and coordination of national research programmes.