Horizon Europe will have a budget of around €95.5 billion for 2021-2027 (current prices).
The Commission welcomes the political agreement between the European Parliament and the Council on Horizon Europe, the largest transnational programme ever supporting research and innovation. The new EU research and innovation programme will have a budget of around €95.5 billion for 2021-2027 (current prices). This includes €5.4 billion (current prices) from NextGenerationEU to boost our recovery and make the EU more resilient for the future, as well as an additional reinforcement of €4.5 billion (current prices). This represents a 30% increase vis-à-vis the current research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020 (comparing Horizon Europe against Horizon 2020 for EU27, in constant prices) and makes it the most ambitious research and innovation programme in the world.
Horizon Europe will promote excellence and provide valuable support to top researchers and innovators to drive the systemic changes needed to ensure a green, healthy and resilient Europe. It will drive scientific excellence through the European Research Council (ERC) to enable our most excellent researchers to push the frontiers of knowledge to tackle our economic and social challenges. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships and exchanges will help the best talent, young researchers, to expand on their knowledge and skills, and Europe will benefit from the scientific advice, technical support and dedicated research of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the Commission’s science and knowledge service.
The programme will also support collaborative research relating to our societal challenges and reinforces technological and industrial capacities through thematic clusters that address the full spectrum of global challenges. For example, Horizon Europe’s Climate Energy and Mobility cluster and the Digital Industry and Space cluster will scale up R&I resources in climate-related domains and ensures that European enterprises have access to the technologies and data they need.
The European missions will focus on ambitious, time-bound and achievable goals to deliver on common European goods. They aim at achieving by 2030 3 million lives saved from cancer diseases, 100 climate neutral cities, healthy oceans, seas and internal waters, healthy soils and food, and regions resilient to climate changes. A streamlined number of European Partnerships will encourage wide participation of partners from public and private sectors, covering critical areas such as energy, transport, biodiversity, health, food and circularity.
Next step
This political agreement is now subject to formal approval by the European Parliament and Council. Since the provisional agreement in March 2019, the Commission has been preparing Horizon Europe’s implementation in order to start the programme as soon as possible in 2021.
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