Global leadership in clean, climate-neutral and resilient industrial value chains, circular economy and climate-neutral and human-centric digital systems and infrastructures, through innovative production and manufacturing processes and their digitisation, new business models, sustainable-by-design advanced materials and technologies enabling the switch to decarbonisation in all major emitting industrial sectors, including green digital technologies.

The speed and scale of the twin green and digital transitions has accelerated, and significant opportunities lie ahead to position the European Union and Associated Countries as a technological and industrial leader of this transition, building on their world class R&I capacities and industrial base. Industrial ecosystems will not only need to develop, but also deploy technologies and reshape their goods and services towards a new reality, ensuring that industry can become the accelerator and enabler of the twin green and digital transition. It will also enhance the Union’s open strategic autonomy with regard to the underlying technologies.

The topics serving the objectives of this destination are structured as follows:

• Manufacturing IndustryThe implementation of the Green Deal has major repercussions for manufacturing. Products and related value chains need to be made circular, carbon-neutral and regenerative – in other words, industry has to make positive contributions to the environment and to society, and offer a negative carbon footprint for future products. Manufacturing is expected to be a key driver in this transformation of industry. Current challenges addressed in 2023-2024 work programme include bio-intelligent manufacturing; high-precision and complex-product manufacturing; circularity and remanufacturing; collaborative distributed manufacturing and business models close to the customers, including Manufacturing as a Service, to enable the evolution from the ‘smart factory’ to the ‘smart value network’.

• A new way to build, accelerating disruptive change in construction: The construction industry needs to improve its productivity and competitiveness, and upskill its workforce. Its transition pathway depends on greater digitalisation, resilience and resource efficiency across the board.

• Energy efficient and climate neutral process industries: From the R&I perspective, climate neutrality by 2050 should be the starting point for any action paving the way to a regenerative industrial transformation. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate mitigation, released in April 2022, points out that the goal of net-zero GHG emissions for industry is challenging but possible. It will need coordinated action throughout value chains to promote all mitigation options, including energy and materials efficiency, circular material flows, as well as abatement technologies and transformational changes in production processes.

In this context, the process industries' climate neutrality goal is strongly related to the objectives of becoming independent on fossil fuel and fossil fuel imports. To reach these objectives, production processes need to be energy efficient, implying advanced digitisation; renewable energies need to be integrated via electrifications or use of hydrogen; and abatement technologies including CCU for processes that are hard to decarbonise need to be further developed.

• Circularity and Zero Pollution in process industries: Energy-intensive industries need to embrace the circular economy and restorative feedback loops, not as an afterthought but as a key pillar of the design of entire value chains. In this context the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, which aims to better protect citizens and the environment whilst boosting the innovation for safe and sustainable chemicals, and its related Strategic Research and innovation agenda are also key. Energy-intensive industries need to commit to engage in Hubs for Circularity and to adopt new collaborative circular business models. There is also a clear space to increase the circularity of industrial wastewater, in symbiosis with urban wastewater, recycling a much higher share of the water, including from the municipal sector to industry and valorising more components in the wastewater.

• Clean Steel: Related to the objectives for energy-intensive industries in general, the steel industry will be enabled to reduce its GHG emissions to the Fit for 55 targets, in particular contributing to fulfilling the new obligations foreseen in the revised ETS Directive to prepare for transition to climate neutrality and to take new pathways towards Circular Economy concepts.

The total call budget of Destination 1 for 2024 is 288.00 Million Euros.

The partnerships which have calls in this Destination are the followings:

For more detailed information about 'Destination 1: Climate neutral, circular and digitised production' please look at the Work Programme 2023-2024 of Cluster 4