The Environment Programme of the EEA Grants 2014-2021, whose operator is the Secretary General for the Environment and Climate Action, is based on three areas of action, namely the promotion of the Circular Economy, the decarbonization of Society and the enhancement of the territory.
The Environment Programme includes several tenders, including Call#4, which aims to promote the development of "living laboratories". The "living laboratories" can be defined as spaces for testing innovative solutions, where multiple stakeholders collaborate in the development, prototyping, validation, testing and application in a real context of new technologies and low carbon services, in delimited areas, with identity local and recognizable by citizens.
The projects approved by this Call are therefore holistic in nature, involving different areas of technical knowledge and different entities, which makes them vast in terms of technical areas and complex in the analysis of the different articulations.
For this reason, the Environment Programme Operator requested a validation of the projects approved by Call#4, focusing on the technical component, to identify in advance any risks of non-compliance with the project in terms of expected results and respective impacts.
The Environment Programme Operator asked Ana Salgueiro, Consulting for Sustainability, to develop a methodology for the technical validation of projects financed under Call#4 – Implementation of pilot projects of living laboratories for decarbonization and mitigation of climate change.