Meklēt

Open strategic autonomy is about ensuring that the EU has the capacity to cope alone if necessary but without ruling out cooperation whenever possible. It goes some steps beyond smart supply chain management by taking into account geopolitics as well as economic factors. It relies on foresight to identify threats and ensures resilience by anticipating the required responses. Could the resulting preparedness also prevent crises by normalising situations that would otherwise become emergencies?

This annual report of the European Parliament's Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) for the year 2022 provides a comprehensive account of European Parliament activity in promoting understanding of and research in the fields of science and technology assessment. The STOA Panel comprises 27 Members of the European Parliament representing 11 parliamentary committees.

The current situation in Ukraine has led to severe supply chain disruptions, contributing to a sharp increase in food and commodity prices globally and the limitation of fossil fuel imports from Russia to the EU. Moreover, to end Europe's dependence on semiconductor suppliers from Asian countries, it is necessary to take immediate action of a structural nature, involving all EU Member States and all participants in regional supply markets. The overall aim of this study was to identify drivers of ...

Over the past 3.8 billion years, nature has been engineering itself to survive. It has also developed efficient and sustainable adaptation mechanisms against changing environmental conditions. To further the EU's political ambitions, could we employ biomimicry to mitigate climate change and achieve climate neutrality?

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global, multidimensional phenomenon occurring in humans, animals, and environmental ecosystems. It is the ability of microbes, e.g. bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa, to survive in the presence of medicines designed to kill or inactivate them (antimicrobials: antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals and antiprotozoals). At patient level, AMR hampers the effective treatment of microbial infections, leading to prolonged, severe disease and, in some cases, death. ...

Ever since the early history of European universities, academic freedom has been acknowledged to be a fundamental feature of any higher education research system or institution. The emergence of the research university model in Germany in the early 1800s, highlighting the basic concepts of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit, contributed strongly to the central position of academic freedom in present-day higher education systems. Following the widespread democratisation of Europe and other parts of the ...

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the true degree of academic freedom around the world despite international declarations, and constitutional and legal protection. This study aims to support the European Parliament's STOA Panel in developing a procedure to monitor developments in academic freedom in the EU Member States. The study provides an overview of the interpretation of academic freedom in different international declarations, and offers a critical assessment of existing evaluation ...

There is growing interest in the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the agri-food sector, to extract or exploit the information in datasets resulting from the monitoring of products and processes. Artificial intelligence algorithms, and the models derived from them, are used as support systems for better decision making or, in some cases, are implemented in automatic control processes and robotics, to alleviate drudgery. In this study, sensing and data collection in different agri-food ...

The European Union is committed to achieving climate neutrality by 2050, which requires a drastic increase in the share of energy from renewable sources in the electricity mix. However, the availability of some renewable energy sources is variable and intermittent, creating concerns about system reliability. Devising new energy storage capacities could solve this issue and contribute to the EU's climate neutrality goal.

This study explores the main impacts of the smart city transition on our cities and, in particular, on citizens and territories. In our research, we start from an analysis of smart city use cases to identify a set of key challenges, and elaborate on the main accelerating factors that may amplify or contain their impact on particular groups and territories. We then present an account of best practices that can help mitigate or prevent such challenges, and make some general observations on their scalability ...