Regional cooperation of EC-funded projects in the Pacific

Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands face several similar societal challenges such as on global and climate change, sustainable cities, clean energy, health, etc. but with different settings and framework conditions.
However, given the complexity of these problems and the regional as well as global dimension, all regions need to develop critical mass of researchers/SMEs and could pool their competences for better tackling these challenges.
As a response to that, the project coordinators of the three major EC-funded projects in the Pacific, which strengthen the collaboration between Europe and Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands in science, technology and innovation, agreed to regional collaboration in the Pacific and joint collaboration with Europe.
These are the projects:
- EU-Australia: Connecting Australian and European Science and Innovation Excellence (CAESIE): http://caesie.org/
- EU-New Zealand: Facilitating Research and Innovation Cooperation between Europe and New Zealand (FRIENZ):  http://frienz.onorcas.co.nz
- EU-Pacific Islands: Pacific Europe Network for Science and Technology (PACE-Net).

As a first step, each of the project coordinators will establish links to the other project websites on his own website. In the course of the projects, the coordinators will exchange information on their projects and communicate with each other towards developing synergies in their project activities or try organizing joint activities.