EU Research News Spring 2024

The EU Research team take a look at current events in the scientific news

European Commissioner Iliana Ivanova calls for easier visas for scientists as UK rejoins Horizon

High expenses for global talent will prevent UK enjoying full benefits of programme, European Research Commissioner Iliana Ivanova says.

The EU has told the UK that it must ease visa procedures and costs for scientists or risk missing out on the full benefits of the Horizon Europe research programme. Iliana Ivanova, the EU research commissioner, discussed the problem with British counterparts including Michelle Donelan, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology on a visit to London to mark the UK’s Horizon re-entry. “We are having some difficulties with European researchers going to the UK due to some visa issues and also higher costs that I’m going to raise with the British side,” she told the Financial Times in an interview. The Bulgarian added that both sides were “doing their best” to resolve these difficulties. “My focus will be on, what is the positive that we can bring and how we can eliminate those shortcomings so that we could speed it up and make it [Horizon] really work,” she said.

The tensions over visas threaten UK efforts to restore the prominent role it had in Horizon before it dropped out of the programme for three years. Horizon has a €93bn budget between 2021-7 and almost 90 countries participate in it, with Canada’s accession just agreed and South Korea in talks. The UK left in 2020 when it exited the EU but struck a deal to rejoin the programme last year as it repaired relations with Brussels. This means British institutions can once again lead consortiums. But the scientific

community in Britain has complained that the UK visa system has become one of the most expensive in the world for recruiting top talent to the country.

Last year the government announced that it was increasing the NHS surcharge for skilled visa holders to the UK health system from £624 to £1,035 a year. It also said that it would hike the cost of visas by at least 15 per cent. The new charges came into force this month. The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, has denounced the visa fees as a “punitive tax on talent”. It claims international researchers wanting to come to the UK face “upfront visa costs up to 10 times higher than the average fees of other leading science nations”. Calculations by the Campaign for Science and Engineering, a UK pressure group, said that the upfront costs for a researcher coming to the UK on a five-year Global Talent visa would jump from £3,743 to £5,890. For a family of five the fee would increase to £20,980 from £13,372 currently.

EU country rules vary, but in some, British nationals must get a work permit even to deliver a paid lecture. Some member states have asked the European Commission to explore a wide ranging mobility deal with the UK covering sectors such as research and development. Several member states have asked for the removal of the NHS surcharge, according to EU officials familiar with internal discussions. Daniel Rathbone, interim executive director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said Ivanova was right to highlight the issue. “Big increases in visa costs, including the immigration health surcharge, are totally counterproductive to the UK government’s ambitions of being a science and technology superpower,” he said.

Canadian and European partnership on the Horizon

Canada is the second country from outside Europe to join, after New Zealand, as the European Commission opens up the initiative to “likeminded” democracies around the globe.

Most hope that Horizon can offer them latitude that is not available from Canadian domestic agencies, like the ability to fund nongovernmental organisation (NGO) partners in their projects. Yet for a country with no history of formal engagement with the EU’s framework programmes, it could be a steep learning curve, with researchers facing an unfamiliar thicket of application and reporting paperwork. However, there are already several established EUCanadian joint projects, cobbled together using special funding and application arrangements, which have run the gamut of integrating Canadians into EU funding schemes.

Canadian association is “very exciting news,” said Anne Broadbent, the incoming Canadian lead of FoQaCia, a transatlantic collaboration seeking fundamental advances in the understanding of quantum algorithms, that could ultimately lead to breakthroughs in quantum computing. It involves universities from Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Poland and the UK, and three Canadian partners. But setting up the call that funded FoQaCia was something of an ordeal, said Broadbent, an associate professor in quantum information processing at the University of Ottawa. “This call was the outcome of years of bilateral discussions between Canada-EU,” she said.

FoQaCia, along with two other projects, was funded through a €8 million special joint call between the Commission and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Under the terms of this deal, applications were only assessed by the EU, rather than NSERC as well, making the whole process far easier.

“A single evaluation process was key in creating a strong bilateral partnership,” Broadbent said. Under Horizon Europe, Canadian

researchers will be able to apply on similar terms, without needing to apply to a Canadian funder as well as the EU, and without the tortuous process of having to set up a targeted joint call each time, as was the case for Broadbent and colleagues.

Once over the paperwork hurdle, there’s flexibility to EU funding that’s often lacking in Canada, said Anna Triandafyllidou, Canada Excellence research chair in migration and integration at Toronto Metropolitan University, and one of the leaders of GAPS, a Horizon Europe funded global study of return migration. Grants in Canada typically cannot fund NGOs, think tanks, or work such as research dissemination work by a small company, said Triandafyllidou. She speaks from her experience as a veteran assessor for EU framework programmes who spent most of her career in Europe before moving to Canada in 2019. “It’s quite restrictive,” Triandafyllidou said. “For me, it’s crazy, because you have to have civil society involvement.” So it might come as a welcome revelation to Canadian researchers that Horizon Europe projects typically have no such restrictions, and include non-university, fully funded partners as a matter of course. Another difference that awaits Canadian researchers is that for EU-funded projects, deadlines and aims are much more concretely fleshed out beforehand than in Canada.

There’s a question over how many Canadian researchers actually realise Horizon Europe, or at least part of it, will soon become an option. “It offers different types of grants. It offers a whole new range of partnerships and networks,” she said. “And of course, it will offer much more visibility”. But, Triandafyllidou acknowledged, some of her colleagues in more remote Canadian universities remain unaware of impending association.

AI office launched by the European Commission to enforce new rules

The office will oversee compliance with the AI Act and foster development of trustworthy artificial intelligence systems.

Ivanova said that UK participation would strengthen Horizon, the world’s largest research programme, and that the EU was working to alleviate “as much as possible any remaining hurdles”. The UK immigration system enabled international researchers to come to the country to contribute to the economy and society while “striking a balance with reducing net migration”, the department for science, innovation and technology said. “Our global talent routes continue to attract and retain high-skilled talent to maintain the UK’s status as a leading international hub for emerging technologies,” it added.

The European Commission has set up an AI office to enforce new rules on artificial intelligence systems and support innovation in AI. The Commission announced it would establish the office in January, as part of a package of measures supporting European start-ups and SMEs to develop AI models. After long negotiations, the Parliament and Council reached agreement in December on the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive legislation to regulate the technology. Member states have approved the text and the Parliament is expected to vote on the deal in its April plenary. The AI office embodies the European Parliament’s idea of having EU-level governance of the AI Act, rather than leaving oversight to member states.

The Commission put itself forward to house the new agency to allow for synergies with other regulations, notably the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), Roberto Viola, director general of Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect) told a conference hosted by the Digitaleurope industry association in Brussels last week. The office will be part of DG Connect with a staff of around 100 people. It “will work with a platform where we have DSA and DMA teams, which also have plenty of experts in algorithms, and our supercomputing branch,” said Viola. The rationale for the dual mandate of oversight and supporting innovation reflects the need “to always look at the two sides of the coin,” he said.

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The AI Office will support governance bodies in member states and enforce the rules for general-purpose AI models. “This is underpinned by the powers given to the Commission by the AI Act, including the ability to conduct evaluations of general-purpose AI models, request information and measures from model providers, and apply sanctions,” the Commission says. Responsibilities will include setting up advisory bodies to ensure a coherent application of the legislation across member states; investigating possible infringements; and preparing guidelines, implementing and delegated acts, and other tools to support the implementation of the AI Act. The office will also promote home-grown artificial intelligence, including setting up ‘AI factories’ providing access to EU supercomputers, to enable training of large general-purpose AI models. “We have a number of start-ups already using our supercomputers, but we also want large companies to be part of it,” Viola said.

The office will also monitor the GenAI4EU initiative, which aims to support the development of different applications of AI. “We have a number of verticals where we will actually use and test generative AI,” said Violo, citing genomics, personalised medicine, climate modelling, and pharma, among others. The AI Act becomes applicable two years after its entry into force, except for some specific provisions. Prohibitions will apply after six months, while the rules on general-purpose AI will apply after 12 months. In the meantime, the Commission will launch an AI pact, calling on developers from Europe and elsewhere to voluntarily commit to implementing key obligations of the AI Act ahead of the legal deadlines.

Recycling through circular business models can provide important reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

Colossal new snake species discovered in Amazon rainforest

New giant snake species discovered during filming of Nat Geo series in the Amazon. Better links between waste management, circular economy and climate change mitigation measures can boost greenhouse gas emission reductions.

The new EEA briefing found that while European countries are already undertaking many initiatives on waste management and circular economy, they can do more to account for these actions and their potential emissions savings, when reporting on climate policies and measures. This will provide a fuller account of climate change mitigation efforts and make more transparent the mitigation opportunities that can be delivered by bolstering circular economy actions.

Achieving the European Union’s 2050 net-zero climate target will demand greater actions across all economic sectors. This includes actions related to materials and how we produce, use, re-circulate and dispose of them. The study looks at how European countries can better include circular economy actions (in general) and waste management actions (more specifically) to speed up reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Waste management and circular economy hold considerable potential for mitigating climate change. Countries can benefit from linking these two areas as part of their climate policy mix, according to the briefing which is based on two technical reports prepared for the EEA. The studies analyse how European countries include circular economy and waste actions in their official EU reporting on climate change mitigation policies and measures, and how the introduction of such measures can help accelerate future reductions of emissions.

Other key findings:

Circular economy actions are generally underrepresented in the reported national climate policies and measures, often due to their cross-sectoral complexity and the absence of specific guidelines to consider them in climate reporting.

Some form of circular economy policies and measures are included in 6% of the climate policies reported by European countries (with a strong focus on waste). Impacts on emission reductions that these actions would deliver are however rarely quantified.

The waste sector’s total GHG emissions in European countries have decreased by 42% since 1990 and are projected to continue declining, with an expected reduction of 68% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels.

While the waste sector accounts for about 3% of GHG emissions, better use of waste as a resource and preventing waste can help reduce emissions in other sectors.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en

Scientists working in the Amazon rainforest have discovered a new species of snake, rumoured to be the biggest in the world. A team from the University of Queensland traveled to the Ecuadorian Amazon to search for the previously undocumented northern green anaconda (Eunectes akayima), following an invitation from the Waorani people to observe anacondas “rumoured to be the largest in existence,” according to the scientists. The team joined the hunters on a 10-day expedition to the Bameno region of Baihuaeri Waorani Territory, before paddling down the river system to “find several anacondas lurking in the shallows, lying in wait for prey,” Professor Bryan Fry, a biologist from the University of Queensland, who led the team, said in a statement.

Anacondas are giant, non-venomous constricting snakes found in or near water in warm parts of South America. “The size of these magnificent creatures was incredible – one female anaconda we encountered measured an astounding 6.3 metres (20.7 feet) long,” Fry said of the team’s discovery, which was made while filming for National Geographic’s upcoming series “Pole to Pole with Will Smith.” The team also said they had heard anecdotal evidence that snakes of 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) and 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) had been

sighted in the area. Green anacondas are the world’s heaviest snakes, according to the UK’s Natural History Museum, which noted that the heaviest individual ever recorded weighed 227 kilograms (500 pounds). It measured 8.43 meters long (27.7 feet) and 1.11 meters (3.6 feet) wide. While another species, the reticulated python, tends to be longer – often reaching more than 6.25 meters (20.5 feet) in length – it is lighter.

But experts studying the creatures discovered that the newly identified northern green anaconda species diverged from the southern green anaconda almost 10 million years ago, and they differ genetically by 5.5%. “It’s quite significant – to put it in perspective, humans differ from chimpanzees by only about 2 per cent,” Fry said. The findings are described in the journal MDPI Diversity. The team then set out to compare the genetics of the green anaconda with other specimens elsewhere to assess them as an indicator species for the health of ecosystems, and warned that the Amazon is facing numerous threats. “Deforestation of the Amazon basin from agricultural expansion has resulted in an estimated 20-31 per cent habitat loss, which may impact up to 40 per cent of its forests by 2050,” Fry said. Habitat degradation, forest fires, drought and climate change threaten rare species like the anacondas, which exist in such rare ecosystems, he added.

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