Editorial Newsletter #4 – March 2022

At less than 6 months of the due date of the FORWARD project, this fourth newsletter relates the successful actions carried out and will also deal with the next steps.

First of all, the third promotional video launched in early January 2022 showcases Forward’s results such as:

events organized by ORs for networking and increasing the visibility of their potential of research and innovation, like in the Canary Islands with the  “blue innovations” event, French Guiana sponsoring the “Virtual Island Summit 2021”, “Rethinking smart islands in Madeira, and “Emergence@azores” in the Azores.  In addition to this, training actions were implemented to strengthen capacity of the outermost regions to answer calls for proposals  in Martinique and Saint-Martin for example.

There have also been mobilities of researchers, as for instance, from Mayotte to Germany on medicinal plants.

Then, in terms of documents produced from exchanges between the consortium of 9 regions, we count the common strategy, the 9 action plans of common interest grouped into 8 themes and the contribution of the territories to the future FORWARD network already called OR-izon network.

The upcoming events joining physically all 9 governments will help to design its implementation such as the final conference at Brussels in June 2022 in conjunction with the final project meeting and the thematic working group subcoordinators.