The SUNRISE project was driven by three main motivational forces.
The first motivational force addresses the damage that the war in Ukraine causes to its HEIs, including their capacity to deliver quality research training, and the ability of EU partner institutions to cooperate over educational and research initiatives. It is noteworthy that the national doctoral school INTENSE, created under the CBHE project 586471 (led by EMU, EE and including SUNRISE partners in Ukraine, 2017-2021) had almost stopped functioning because its ICT infrastructure (hosted by OSENU, UA) was in periodic outages due to: frequent blackouts; reduction of human resources of Ukrainian institutions (i.e. teaching, research, technical and administrative support), because of brain drain, drafting to the army, war casualties; and blocked or constrained access to research facilities. PhD supervisors are in fact not available or severely overworked to compensate for human resource shortages, etc.
The second motivational force considers that the war has brought new challenges to the environmental sector. The need to create new resilience and planning for postwar recovery calls for the development of new areas of research and teaching expertise. Such fields of expertise include enhancing disaster preparedness through a 'building back better' approach, the development of resilient and autonomous energy systems, the assessment of war damage, and the restoration and recultivation of ecosystems, food systems, settlements, etc.
The third motivational force envisions that, in order to ensure the maintenance and further development of Ukrainian partners and their academic profiles under and after the conditions of war and destruction, the institutions should have in place comprehensive strategies addressing the whole diversity of issues to solve, ranging from the brain drain and dropping enrollments to the physical damage to properties and equipment.
SUNRISE is seeking to address these three areas through the development of the capacity of EU HEIs for cooperating with Ukrainian counterparts, as well as the capacity of the latter to make direct use of this cooperation and to relaunch PhD training in environmental sciences, management and policy at competitive level, delivering on the needs of the Ukrainian society. These actions need EU support because Ukraine is struggling to maintain even the basic functions of its HEIs; at the same time, the cooperating EU HEIs, although potentially they have all the required expertise and will to help, are limited in their capacity to create sufficient supporting action for addressing the problematic areas. Two EU partners – UniCam and UniZg have their own track record of successful disaster survival (a series of 4 earthquakes for UniCam, and two earthquakes plus the war for UNIZG), and share the expertise and lessons learned on their way to recovery.
