2020 has been an exceptional year. The pandemic pushed back the development for an important number of challenges facing the world including climate change.

MedEcoSuRe, a project addressing this challenge, will set up tools and strategic plans to implement innovative and eco-sustainable energy renovation solutions for university buildings in the Mediterranean.

With the end of the year approaching, and in the hope of getting over the COVID-19 pandemic safely, we would like to extend  our sincere thanks to ENI CBC MED programme and our partners for their cooperation and collaboration, during these difficult times, which are the key for successful projects implementation.

Following, are some of the approaches adopted to effectively implement the project activities during the covid-19 outbreak:

• All the activities foreseen were launched and implemented while maintaining a high level of collaboration with partners and stakeholders, and while exploiting internet-based platforms.
• A participated design process was adopted, making it possible to take into account the contributions of stakeholders involved in the project. This resulted in a successful establishment of the Cross Border Living Lab, through a series of webinars, which is a virtual intermediation entity for collaboration and decision making.
• New forms for activities delivery were defined. Launching an online training programme for students is one of them, which turned out to be a very fruitful and successful experience for students and researchers enabling them to enrich their background, to hone their technical skills, and to express and share their takes on various technical issues.
• In order to make up for the delay which affected/might  affect the project progress, some activities started earlier than planned, such as the development of a decision aid tool enabling to plan and optimize building retrofitting in university buildings, the installation of PV power plants, the installation of Smart Grid experimental platform…

Finally, it may seem like the covid19 outbreak has put the world on hold. However, we need to be reminded that together we can overcome !