The EnerSHelF project is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Its’ funding measure “CLIENT II – International Partnerships for Sustainable Innovation” finances 64 projects that spread across 32 countries – one of them being EnerSHelF. All of them are working on solutions for climate, energy, environmental, and resource challenges that occur in the partner countries. To foster the exchange between the various projects, the second Client II conference of the funding period took place in the last week of October. It was organised as a hybrid event with project’s being able to join from anywhere in the world but also meet in person at the event’s venue “Umweltforum”, Berlin.

As one of 17 selected projects, EnerSHelF was invited to present its recent progress. Prof. Stefanie Meilinger from the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg – one of EnerSHelF’s project leaders – highlighted what has been worked on within the past year, what worked well, and what were and still are challenges.

The conference was packed with inspiring presentations, where fruitful discussions on shared challenges, especially driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, unfolded. During and in-between the presentations, the project’s coordinators and researchers had the chance for informal exchange and knowledge transfer in specific regional exchange sessions.

Besides the presentations and regional sessions, a line of workshops was conducted on various interlinkages: science-practice interface, science-science interface, and science-policy interface. Furthermore, the participants discussed new opportunities of virtual spaces such as online meetings and events as well as how each project mastered the crisis. Here, the experience exchange on risk management and resilience during the pandemic served as the starting point of discussion.