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Making emergency planning simpler, clearer, and more inclusive by involving citizens alongside first responders and public authorities.
CARES is a 36-month European project funded under the Horizon Europe research programme. The initiative addresses an increasingly urgent challenge: extreme weather events and sudden disruptions often reveal the limits of traditional, static emergency response plans.
To bridge this gap, CARES builds a "Whole-of-Society" preparedness model. This approach brings together government agencies, local emergency services, and everyday citizens to ensure that communities do not merely react to crises, but actively help shape how preparedness and evacuations are managed.
Respiratory diseases represent a major and persistent public health challenge in the European Union, contributing substantially to morbidity, mortality, healthcare utilisation, and health inequalities. Despite existing initiatives, respiratory health remains insufficiently integrated into broader infection, prevention and control strategies, vaccination plans, programmes to fight antimicrobial resistance. Facing this context, Active Citizenship Network has launched the second edition of the project "Advancing Respiratory Care at the EU Level", confirming its ongoing commitment to the topic.
Funded by the UCPM (EU Civil Protection Mechanism) programme, Empower-Citizens (Empowering Citizens by Considering their Feedback in Preparedness Plans) is a two-year project that aims to provide effective solutions to support the resilience of European communities affected by disasters and emergencies.
At a time characterised by increasingly frequent and severe disasters, partly due to ongoing climate change, Empower-Citizens aims to help rethink the way we manage these events and to foster collaboration amongst all stakeholders within the community.
Now more than ever, involving citizens in civil protection actions and plans is essential.
CIRCONOMY is an EU-funded project supporting Europe’s transition to a circular economy by developing practical, harmonised micro-level circularity indicators to better measure and understand circular resource use at local levels.
CIRCONOMY helps Europe move faster towards a circular economy by making it easier to understand and measure how resources are used and reused in everyday life. Today, most available data on circular economy performance is too general to help local authorities, companies, or citizens take practical action.
CIRCONOMY is developing a new way to measure circularity using clear and practical indicators that work at local level. These indicators will be integrated into a simple digital tool designed to help municipalities, businesses, and households understand their impact and identify ways to improve.
Rationale:
Protecting the Value of Vaccination Across Europe
Advancing Vaccination policies through civic engagement in Europe
Background
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a common respiratory virus that in most instances causes mild, cold-like symptoms. Infants under six months of age are at risk of being hospitalised with severe illness which in rare cases can lead to death. RSV can also worsen existing medical conditions and cause serious complications that can be life-threatening in children and adults with underlying conditions and in older individuals such as those over 65 years of age. In infants, RSV is a leading cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia.
As of early November 2025, surveillance data indicate an increase in RSV detections from baseline levels in some EU/EEA countries, particularly among children under five years of age.
The current increase in RSV case numbers is occurring in parallel with gradually rising seasonal influenza circulation and ongoing SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
Empowered citizens, personalised care: a new era for prevention in Europe
12 May 2026
14:00 – 16:00 CEST
Room A1G369
European Parliament, Brussels
REGISTER HERE to participate
Introduction and aim of the initiative
At a time when Europe is facing a growing burden of chronic diseases and a rapidly ageing population, the need to strengthen prevention has become a critical priority. However, prevention can no longer be conceived as a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Today, scientific and technological advances allow us to shift toward personalised prevention – interventions tailored to each individual's biological, environmental, behavioural, and socio-economic characteristics.
This new paradigm, integrating genomic data, lifestyles, risk factors, and personal preferences, not only promises greater effectiveness in early diagnosis and disease prevention but also lays the foundation for a more inclusive, sustainable, and person-centred healthcare system. However, this transformation can only succeed if citizens and patients are recognised and supported as active participants. Without their informed, meaningful, and ongoing engagement, personalised medicine risks remaining an innovative promise that fails to reach its full societal impact.
The Single Market shows a strong asymmetry in the relationship between consumers and businesses. The current context is marked by limited awareness of consumer rights, a weak and underdeveloped culture of complaint, and the proliferation of unfair commercial practices, both online and offline. The groups most affected by these practices—especially online—are primarily young people.
The Consumer (Re)generation project (CoRe) aims to provide citizens with knowledge and skills to make informed and responsible decisions, protect their rights, know how to navigate in the complexity of the modern market.
This project has received funding from the Single Market Programme, the EU funding programme which finances activities supporting a well-functioning, sustainable internal market.
Active Citizenship Network, in partnership with RPP Group, is launching a strategic initiative aimed at advancing respiratory care at the European Union level. The effort seeks to address the persistent lack of political attention given to respiratory diseases, despite their significant and growing impact on public health, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The initiative builds on the momentum of the activities carried out by ACN in 2023 through the EU project “Protecting the value of access to healthcare during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe: focus on antivirals” and in 2024 through the EU project “Empowering & mobilizing PAGs on COVID-19 prevention & treatments for vulnerable target groups”, which laid the foundations through political engagement, awareness-raising campaigns and collaboration with Members of the European Parliament.
Especially throughout 2024, the project achieved significant milestones, including the successful integration of COVID-19-related health priorities into the EU Health Agenda, with a particular focus on vulnerable populations and workforce development.
Cittadinanzattiva APS
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