The Thematic Community Project of the Innovative Sustainable Economy mission follows up with the work carried out between 2016 and 2022 by the Interreg MED Green Growth Community.
The Interreg Euro-MED mission on Innovative Sustainable Economy aims to build and strengthen a cross-border cooperation network throughout the Mediterranean area, to promote the achievement of sustainable development objectives in this region. The mission work follows up on the work done between 2016 and 2022 by the Interreg MED Green Growth Community (GGC).
The GGC focused during the previous programming period on promoting the green and circular economy in the Mediterranean region, helping to create synergies between 17 projects grouping 165 entities from 13 countries. The community supported those projects in their capitalisation and transfer efforts, enhancing the visibility of their results, increasing their impact at the policy level and ensuring their potential replication in other territories.
The community promoted innovation in the fields of food systems, eco-innovation, smart cities and waste management, contributing to the achievement of the targets set in the EU Green Deal and the EU Circular Economy Action Plan. The Innovative Sustainable Economy mission of the current Interreg Euro-MED programme will integrate the outputs and lessons learnt of the GGC and build up on them.
The Green Growth Community outputs
The GGC outputs range from policy recommendations and white papers to a catalogue of project results and a joint position paper with other Interreg MED communities. The results are all available in the Green Growth Capitalisation Platform, with a section especially aimed at decision-makers and institutional bodies. The community also gathered the available instruments on green growth and related topics in the Euro-Mediterranean region in a Policy Hub. The hub is available online and gives a clear overview of the available instruments at a national and regional level.
The results upon which the Innovative Sustainable Economy mission will be built are mapped in the GGC catalogues. They map the results, best practices, solutions and recommendations. The catalogue of the project’s actionable knowledge presents factsheets for each community project, providing insights into the problems addressed, projects’ solutions, best practices, lessons learnt and recommendations. On the other hand, the catalogue of project results gathers the projects’ results, their challenges, transfer and capitalisation potential and evaluation by end-users.
The GGC also elaborated a policy reflection paper highlighting the contributions of the community to specific EU policy objectives. The paper presents EU policies relevant to the four focus areas of the community – food systems, smart cities, waste management and eco-innovation – and showcase how the projects have contributed to the implementation of the objectives of these policy frameworks, by highlighting key project results and activities. Following the policy papers line, the community developed a Joint Policy Paper with the Interreg MED Renewable Energy and Efficient Buildings communities defining a common position for sustainable development of the Mediterranean region in a cross-thematic way, and regardless of country borders.
All these outputs and insights were already brought in during the design phase of the Innovative Sustainable Economy mission activities and will be core to advancing towards a smarter and greener Mediterranean region.
