“Decarbonization is a matter of survival”: this is how Mario Draghi described this challenge in his report on European competitiveness in September 2024. This European scale of action is becoming increasingly crucial in a fragmented and multipolar world, as the European Union has in recent years adopted standards, plans, tools, and initiatives to combine the reindustrialization of the European continent with the achievement of climate goals.

With this in mind, raising awareness of and promoting the PEPR SPLEEN and the France 2030 plan in Brussels, and bringing together French and European stakeholders committed to the decarbonization of industry to build a community dedicated to this issue are two major objectives of our research program.

With this in mind, an event titled “Enhancing Research in Europe to Build a Low-Carbon Industry” was organized in Brussels on September 18, 2024, by the SPLEEN management team, bringing together industry representatives, European Union officials, and researchers.

In an effort to structure its European approach, the SPLEEN program established a SPLEEN-EU (Europe Uplift) framework designed to strengthen the program’s European impact and influence. This initiative took concrete form in 2026 with the decision to appoint a European liaison within each SPLEEN project. The designated individual is responsible for the following tasks:

– Monitoring and identifying European opportunities. Identify opportunities for European calls for proposals that could create synergies with the project for which you serve as the European liaison. Make recommendations within the project regarding the identified calls, either as a coordinator or a partner. You may also draw on the European services of your institution (EPIC, EPST, University) to carry out this task.

– Dissemination of the skills developed within the project that could be used to respond to European calls for proposals. Distribute a map of the skills developed within the project to targeted networks of potential European partners, to be identified in collaboration with the project consortium members (objective: to raise the profile of the SPLEEN teams so that they may be approached when forming European consortia).

– Strategic input for future planning. Within the project consortium, potentially contribute to strategic discussions on future European programs and calls for proposals by providing scientific and technological expertise, for example through the Processes4Planet public-private partnership.

This initiative is intended to increase SPLEEN’s influence on European programming, foster the development of new partnerships, and enable the organization to prepare coordinated responses to European calls for proposals. Future initiatives will aim to build on and expand this commitment to amplifying SPLEEN’s impact with and through Europe.