EU-Wide Advantages & Opportunities for “Innovative Approaches to Intangible Cultural Heritage for Societal Resilience” (HORIZON-CL2-2025-02-HERITAGE-02)

1. Strategic Fit with EU Priorities

• European Green Deal & Climate Adaptation – The call explicitly seeks ICH-based climate mitigation/adaptation solutions, dovetailing with the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy, the New European Bauhaus and the Renovation Wave.

• Digital Europe & Europe’s Digital Decade – Strong emphasis on AI, immersive tech, FAIR data and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) aligns the project with Digital Europe and EOSC objectives.

• EU Youth Strategy & New Agenda for Culture – Mandatory youth engagement and inter-generational transmission reinforces EU youth participation goals.

• Gender Equality & Inclusive Society – Required gender-sensitive approaches support the Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025 and the EU Action Plan against Racism.

2. Single Market Access (450+ million consumers & visitors)

• Pan-European Cultural Tourism – Developing ICH-based visitor experiences can tap into Europe’s €400 bn tourism market by packaging cross-border itineraries (e.g. craft routes, ritual festivals) that meet common EU quality labels (EDEN, Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe).

• Creative & Cultural Industries (CCI) – Harmonised IP rules (Trade Mark Regulation, Design Directive) ease EU-wide commercialisation of ICH-inspired products (fashion, music, games, AR/VR content).

• Green & Circular Construction – Traditional eco-friendly building methods can feed the €1.4 tn EU construction market under common CE-marking standards.

3. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange

• Minimum three-country consortium requirement (HORIZON-RIA) automatically triggers multinational partnerships.

• Living Labs & Community Hubs – The grant encourages co-creation with ICH bearer communities; setting up transnational Living Labs (e.g., alpine, Mediterranean, Baltic) lets partners compare climate-risk scenarios and replicate solutions.

• Mobility of Researchers & Practitioners – Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Erasmus+, and Creative Europe mobility schemes can be layered to exchange artisans, storytellers, ethnologists and digital creatives.

• Shared Risk Assessment Methodologies – A common EU template for ICH climate-risk assessments can emerge, reducing duplication and fostering mutual learning.

4. Regulatory Harmonisation & Standards Setting

• Alignment with UNESCO 2003 Convention – EU projects can pioneer standard operating procedures for safeguarding that Member States may later transpose.

• Data Interoperability – Using pan-European metadata standards (Europeana Data Model, CIDOC-CRM) ensures automatic integration with ECCCH and the European Open Science Cloud.

• Ethics & IP – EU guidance on Traditional Knowledge Digital Sequence Information (Nagoya Protocol) and GDPR offers a harmonised legal environment, reducing compliance costs vs. 27 different regimes.

5. Access to Pan-European Innovation Ecosystem

• Research Infrastructures – Direct links to ESFRI landmarks (e.g., CLARIN for linguistic heritage, DARIAH for digital humanities) provide high-end services, crowdsourced corpora and AI pipelines.

• Partnership on Resilient Cultural Heritage – Early alignment guarantees access to a pipeline worth €150 m under Horizon Europe Cluster 2.

• Regional Innovation Valleys (RIVs) – ICH-driven SMEs can plug into RIV clusters for prototyping bio-based materials, cultural AI or heritage tech.

6. Funding Synergies & Blending Opportunities

1. Creative Europe – Scale narrative, audiovisual and festival outputs after RIA ends.

2. European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) & Interreg – Finance Living Lab infrastructures, ICH visitor centres and cross-border routes.

3. LIFE – Co-fund nature-based solutions inspired by traditional land-use practices.

4. InvestEU / EIB Culture & Creativity window – Offer patient capital for spin-offs commercialising ICH-inspired products or immersive experiences.

5. Erasmus+ & MSCA – Support training, PhD networks and craft apprenticeships, ensuring long-term skills transfer.

7. EU-Scale Deployment, Visibility & Impact

• Policy Uptake – DG EAC, DG REGIO and DG CLIMA actively seek evidence for heritage-based resilience; RIA outputs can feed into Council Conclusions and future EU Disaster Risk Reduction policy.

• Benchmarking & KPI Harmonisation – A pan-EU dashboard on ICH resilience indicators enables policymakers to track SDG, Climate Adaptation and Cohesion Policy targets.

• Economies of Scope – Aggregating 27 Member State datasets under FAIR principles reduces per-country digital preservation costs and maximises AI training corpora.

• Cultural Diplomacy – Showcasing results through EU Delegations and the European External Action Service extends influence to candidate and neighbourhood countries.

8. Practical Tips to Maximise EU-Wide Advantage

• Build a consortium that mirrors Europe’s cultural-ecological diversity (e.g., Arctic, Atlantic, Alpine, Danube, Mediterranean) to test transferability.

• Secure letters of commitment from at least two Directorate-Generals (e.g., DG REGIO, DG CLIMA) to guarantee policy uptake.

• Integrate a data-management work package that feeds directly into the ECCCH using common persistent identifiers (Handle/DOI) and multilingual vocabularies.

• Plan post-project roll-out via a spin-off non-profit European Association for ICH Resilience to sustain stakeholder network beyond the 4-year RIA.

Bottom Line: Operating at EU level multiplies cultural, economic and societal returns: larger tourism markets, unified digital-heritage infrastructure, joint climate-resilience standards, streamlined IP and data governance, and seamless access to complementary EU funds. National projects cannot match this scale, network density or policy leverage.