The European Commission has adopted the second Horizon Europe strategic plan covering the years 2025-2027. This plan will steer the final €47.75 billion of research and innovation funding under the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe program, the EU’s key funding program for research and innovation from 2021-2027.
Building on the first strategic plan that covered 2021-2024, the second plan aims to ensure Horizon Europe continues to contribute to the EU’s strategic priorities, including the European Green Deal, the digital transition, and building a more resilient, competitive, inclusive and democratic Europe. It also incorporates lessons learned and new developments since the first plan was established.
Three Key Strategic Orientations
At the core of the strategic plan are three interlinked key strategic orientations that encapsulate the main EU policy priorities requiring significant research and innovation contributions:
- Supporting the green transition to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 and tackle biodiversity loss and pollution.
- Accelerating the digital transition to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy in digital technologies.
- Building a more resilient, competitive, inclusive and democratic Europe to overcome challenges like health threats, socioeconomic inequalities, and threats to democratic values.
Cutting across all three orientations are the principles of open strategic autonomy and securing Europe’s leading role in developing and deploying critical and emerging technologies. This reflects the changing geopolitical context and new research security concerns since the first plan.
Ambitious Targets for Climate, Biodiversity and Digital
The new plan raises Horizon Europe’s ambition and commitments in key areas. It introduces a target to dedicate 10% of the budget in 2025-2027 to biodiversity-related research and innovation. This complements the existing target of spending 35% of the total Horizon Europe budget on climate objectives.
For digital technologies, the goal remains to invest at least €13 billion between 2021-2027 in core areas like artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, cybersecurity, and advanced computing. This investment is seen as crucial for Europe’s competitiveness and open strategic autonomy.
Novelties and Enhancements
Compared to the first strategic plan, the 2025-2027 edition makes some notable changes:
- It simplifies the impact logic, removing “impact areas” to focus more directly on expected impacts.
- It strengthens coverage of and linkages between the three main pillars of Horizon Europe – Excellent Science, Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, and Innovative Europe – as well as the part on Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area.
- It introduces new sections on specific issues like synergies with other EU programs, the balance between research and innovation, and social innovation.
- It identifies the New European Bauhaus as a cross-cutting initiative with components in 2025-2027.
- It selects nine new European Partnerships in areas like brain health, raw materials, cultural heritage and social transformations.
- It takes stock of the first years of the five EU Missions on cancer, climate adaptation, oceans and waters, climate-neutral cities, and soil health, outlining next steps to ensure their impact.
- It adds a section on research security to highlight tools to mitigate related risks.
Co-Designed Through Extensive Consultation
The strategic plan is the result of an extensive co-design process led by the Commission services in consultation with Member States, the European Parliament, and over 2000 stakeholders and citizens.
A key input was a comprehensive analysis of the research and innovation landscape, covering global challenges, policy needs, foresight, and implementation data from the first years of Horizon Europe. An open public consultation, attracting over 2200 responses, and a dedicated citizen engagement event also gathered valuable input.
The resulting plan promotes consistency between EU, national and regional priorities and ensures coherence of funding beyond the typical 2-year span of Horizon Europe work programs. It enables stakeholders to engage with the Commission on priorities and allows national authorities to align their strategies with EU-level initiatives.
Delivering Benefits for All
With its investments strategically oriented by the new plan, Horizon Europe is expected to continue delivering significant benefits for the research community, the economy, and society at large.
It will support excellent, impactful research and breakthrough innovations to address pressing challenges. It will help modernize and decarbonize Europe’s industry, protect nature and biodiversity, improve public health and wellbeing, and strengthen democratic resilience. And it will develop and deploy the critical technologies Europe needs to be globally competitive and strategically autonomous.
For maximum impact, the plan emphasizes synergies with other EU programs as well as multilateral international cooperation in strategic areas. It also underlines key principles like ethics and research integrity, open science, gender equality and inclusiveness, and the “do no harm” approach to environmental objectives.
In the coming months, the strategic orientations and expected impacts set out in the plan will be translated into topics for research and innovation actions through the Horizon Europe work programs for 2025 and 2026-2027. With its framework now established, Horizon Europe stands ready to invest in knowledge, talent and innovation to build a greener, more digital and more resilient future for Europe.
