COST to benefit from EIB support
Participants in COST (Committee of senior officials for scientific and technical research) welcomed a presentation from Jean-Jacques Mertens of the European Investment Bank (EIB) at a meeting in Brussels on 15 and 16 March, explaining how the public sector can benefit further from EIB support. As part of the 'Innovation 2000 Initiative', the EIB is able to increase its support for basic research undertaken by the public sector, and will in the future be able to co-finance public R&D programmes, particularly where the investment involves cooperative links with the Community programmes or international public research centres. EIB support for areas covered by its initiative will take the form of a dedicated 12 to 15 billion euro lending programme, plus a further one billion euro for developing venture capital operations over the next three years. The committee also agreed to requests for participation from Canada, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the USA in individual COST actions. Nine new actions were also agreed at the meeting, to be carried out in the following areas: - Channel modelling and propagation impairment mitigation for millimetre wave radio systems - Emerging technology in electromagnetic fields and health - The environmental impact of traffic and the transport infrastructure - Water pollution in natural porous media - Plant-soil interactions in the rhizosphere environment - Gametic cells and molecular breeding for crop improvement - Foodborne zoonoses - Applied biocatalysts - Integrative computational chemistry The next meeting of senior officials will take place in Akureyri, Iceland on 7 to 8 June 2001.