PNRR-funded PRIN research projects / Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Projects funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU — NRRP Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1 ‘Fund for the National Research Programme and Projects of National Interest (NRP)’

MUR Directorial Decree 1409 of 14/02/2022 (Notice PRIN 2022 PNRR)
MUR Directorial Decree 104 of 02/02/2022 (Notice PRIN 2022)
- 2022372A7R –Assessment and valorization of biochar amendment for promoting soil health, carbon storage and sustainable viticulture (BIO-C-VITE)
- 20225TN2R9 – Italian borderscapes after 2020. Mapping, unfolding, and re-framing border territories in response to the Covid-19 pandemic

P2022HYTTE — Climate Resilient Strategies by Archetype-based Urban Energy Modelling (CRiStAll)

The rising of ambient temperature consequent to global climate change has been identified as one of the main drivers of the building overheating, which determines higher energy demand and worsening of the environmental quality. To the warming induced by long-term climate change, population in urban areas also experiences local warming with temperature higher than that in the surrounding rural areas, due to the so called Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Though it has been widely acknowledged that the UHI has significant impact on building energy performance, only a limited number of studies succeeded to accurately quantify this variation, because of the challenges in acquiring climatic data at microscale and in modelling the drivers of UHI taking into account buildings and surroundings interactions.
The project aims to overcome the research gaps by creating high spatial resolution climatic datasets, in which future weather files – generated assuming the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scenarios – coupled with typical urban context configurations of Italian building archetypes, will be used to assess the UHI effects in short, medium and long term.
Coordinator: Politecnico di Torino
Principal Investigator unibz: Giovanni Pernigotto - Faculty of Engineering
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 – 29/11/2025

P20229EL9W — Cyber resilience: markets, investments and regulation

This project aims to investigate the factors influencing the exposure of firms and consumers to cyber risk, the economic incentives of firms to invest in cybersecurity, and their interplay with the environment in which firms operate (specifically, the market structure and the digital infrastructure). The focus is to understand the role of regulation, by designing the optimal policy tools that can spur investments in cyber security while avoiding potentially unintended effects, and by analyzing the effects of the privacy regulation currently in place.
Coordinator: Politecnico di Torino
Principal Investigator unibz: Mirco Tonin - Faculty of Economics and Management
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 – 29/11/2025

P2022SRELF — Rice by-products valorization: from the recovery of bioactive compounds to the regeneration of used frying oils (RAINDROP)

In a circular economy approach, the value of products, materials and resources is maintained in the economy for as long as possible, minimizing waste generation. Briefly, the by-product of a process becomes the input of a new process where it acquires new value.

In this regard, rice (Oryza sativa) by-products and the used frying oils are an excellent candidate to be valorized, for two main reasons: they contain great amounts of bioactive molecules, and they are produced in great amounts.

Within this context, the present project aims to develop innovative approaches for the valorization of rice by-products and the regeneration of used frying oils. To this purpose, bioactive compounds from rice by-products will be recovered using green extraction technologies. These products will undergo a thorough characterization, also evaluating the bioactivity properties. The spent material obtained at the end of the extractions will be then used as an absorbent bed through which the frying oil will move using as desorbent mobile phase carbon dioxide at supercritical conditions. Detailed, the absorbent capacity of the silica contained in rice by-products will be exploited for the absorption of frying oils’ low molecular weight compounds such as free fatty acids, mono and diglycerides.

The regenerated frying oils will be tested for their physico-chemical properties, including the assessment of the oxidative stability, so to evaluate their suitability to be reutilized in frying processes and estimate their shelf life. Specific frying tests will be carried out using a starchy product, such as French fries, as a reference.
Coordinator: Università degli Studi di Verona
Principal Investigator unibz: Maria Concetta Tenuta - Faculty of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 - 29/11/2025

P2022JS9HM — Dialoguing Species - Designing Common Worlds through Ethnographies (DSooE)

Is it possible for us humans to keep inhabiting the world we share with other species and thriving as a species without harming other species and instead finding ways to thrive together? Is it possible to do it without giving up what has always characterized our human species, namely the fact that we are a habitat changing and a technology equipped species?

This research project intends to identify possible answers to these questions by looking in depth at two specific Italian cases of expert practices mobilized in order to protect the biodiversity while allowing human activities and in comparing these practices with cutting edge designing projects around Europe (and beyond). As for the two in depth cases, they are: biodiversity in waterways and lacustrine habitats in Piedmont, on the one hand, alpine high pastures in Trentino Alto Adige, on the other.
Coordinator: Libera Università di Bolzano
Principal Investigator unibz: Elisabeth Tauber - Faculty of Design and Art
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 - 29/11/2025

P20227RKF9 — Consumer behavior, digital platforms and spatial spillover effects in a dual electricity market (SPEX)

Technological and social advancements occurred over the last decades, and even more so the upheavals we are currently experiencing, are still contributing to substantially reshape the way in which energy is produced and consumed worldwide. On the demand side, the preferences of various types of users are switching towards a more environmental-friendly form of consumption. On the supply side, in turn, a gradual shift is occurring from a centralized production system, mainly intended to take full advantage of the available scale economies, to a decentralized system in which innovative small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are becoming the main actors, along with the users themselves. On top of that, policies both at global and local level are increasingly directed to promote of renewable energy sources and the exploitation of cross-border interconnections, in addition to guarantee adequate levels of competition in energy supply industries. While these processes appear transversal to the markets of the various sources of energy, they are unquestionably more evident and at more advanced stage, in the market for electricity, to which this research project will specifically focus on.
Coordinator: Università degli Studi di Bologna
Principal Investigator unibz: Carlo Gallier - Faculty of Economics and Management
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 - 29/11/2025

P2022C3XSS — A Remedy for the Demand of Bad Policies (REMEDIES)

The project analyzes the citizens’ demand for bad policies and its remedies. Inefficient government policies are widespread and cause enormous losses in welfare. While a sizeable political economy literature has focused on the supply of bad policies through the interaction of low-quality politicians, inadequate institutions, and lobbying, there is little evidence of the demand for inefficient policies. An influential paper by Dal Bò, Dal Bò, and Eyster (2018) shows that, in an experimental setting, citizens vote for bad policies over welfare-enhancing ones, and provides compelling evidence that this unexpected choice can be due to the underestimation of equilibrium effects. Citizens think that, when moving from the status quo to a new policy, the general behavior of other individuals will remain constant. This bias makes them compare erroneous payoffs for the new policy, potentially leading them to demand (through voting) a bad policy. The project extends this simple yet insightful setup by exploring the mechanisms of the demand for bad policies, and testing remedies. Taking advantage of the underestimation of equilibrium effects, we first replicate the results by Dal Bò, Dal Bò, and Eyster, and then test, in a laboratory experiment, whether citizens can be induced to vote for a “priority” policy. A “priority” policy, while in equilibrium leading to a welfare enhancement with respect to the status quo, gives incentives (“a priority”) to voters who think that all other individuals will keep their behavior constant, and they will be the only ones optimizing. This behavioral consideration is ultimately wrong because all individuals will converge to equilibrium. Thus, priority policies can be used to restore the first best when citizens underestimate equilibrium effects. Priority policies are already employed and proposed in different real contexts, such as bike boxes in front of cars at traffic lights, or family priority in organ transplants when one signs up for organ donation. The design of the experimental setting will permit analyzing alternative mechanisms to the behavioral bias detected by Dal Bò, Dal Bò, and Eyster. The project thus will provide a complete analysis of the demand for bad policies and test realistic and practical solutions to this problem.
Coordinator: Libera Università di Bolzano
Principal Investigator unibz: Paolo Roberti - Faculty of Economics and Management
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 - 29/11/2025

P2022E22CX — Deep mapping crisis and transformation in non-metropolitan areas: Representations, society and territorial policies (Deepmap)

While non-urban areas have been much investigated, they are often scrutinized standing from a mainly urban point of view. The voices of non-urban territories struggle to be heard because they lack strength and mass and much artistic and literary production also often contributes to the same biased narrative.

The pandemic crisis highlighted some relevant aspects. It was precisely during the period of confinement that the urban gaze turned to the villages, in which a possible better quality of life in isolation was perceived. But those who have long observed (and criticized) the adoption of tourism as an homogeneous solution to the critical issues of places in transition have not been surprised by the brief popularity of the non-urban in pandemic. It has indeed been consistent with so many trends related to the marketing and attractiveness of small towns: places to be preserved or beautified for the use of urban populations.

It is necessary to stop looking at non-urban territories from afar, using categories that once again reveal an urban-centric vision. Instead, it might be useful to represent the non-urban territories in their present time and read residents' ambitions for what they are, without having to relate them back to what is part of the imagination of those who observe us from the city. This is the gap where this project intends to contribute: representing non-metropolitan territories with interdisciplinary tools that depict territories and communities dialogically and creatively. A research group composed of academics and artists, works together with concerned citizens and local authorities, using the methodology of deep mapping, a dialogic research method that uses a diverse set of tools, including documentary, collaborative ethnography, and cartographic representations to give voice to "unrepresented" places or those that are usually represented by others. Deep mapping is well suited to make understandable the drivers of change such as globalization, demographic transformations, mobility and migration, as well as the local impacts of the global crisis, using democratic modes of knowledge production and policy formulation.
Coordinator: Libera Università di Bolzano
Principal Investigator unibz: Daniele Ietri - Faculty of Education
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 - 29/11/2025

P2022EC749 — Digital technolgies for social inclusion? The experience of service users and social workers in social and health care settings (Dig.It.In)

Social work, as a profession and a discipline pursuing social justice, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed people, is uniquely positioned to promote the use of digital technologies for social inclusion, at the micro and the macro level, fostering equal access to digitized services, as well as digital well-being. In social and health care services, digital technologies have helped to tackle processes of exclusion during the pandemic, fostering organizational and professional innovation, while showing the potentials of these media. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies analyzing the use of digital technologies in health and social care settings, as well as of systematic concepts for the evaluation of the impact of digital technologies on service users, professionals and welfare organizations.

This research project aims to fill in these gaps, focusing on service users and social workers’ experiences of digitally mediated services and practices, with the aim of promoting a process of collective learning in digital innovation in social and health care settings. The overall goal is to understand how health social workers can ensure an effective, inclusive, secure and ethical development and delivery of digital technologies in integrated care settings, valuing the perspectives of both professionals and service users, while involving them in a process of co-construction of knowledge, necessary to foster inclusive and human-centric innovation.

The research findings will provide new evidence to inform health social work practice and education, as well as the development of digital policies within integrated care settings.
Coordinator: Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Principal Investigator unibz: Urban Nothdurfter - Faculty of Education
Project Duration: 30/11/2023 - 29/11/2025

2022372A7R — Assessment and valorization of biochar amendment for promoting soil health, carbon storage and sustainable viticulture (BIO-C-VITE)

Biochar, a fraction of the biomass pyrolization process, incorporated into agricultural soils can increase the plant productivity, maintain or enhance the soil fertility, allows carbon (C) sequestration, with no adverse effects on soil biota. This project aims to elucidate the effects of biochar amendment of vineyard soils as long-term sustainable and regenerative practice in the crucial sector of viticulture, by bridging a unique set of field trials conducted in collaboration between Academia and Research Institutes, and vine Companies, with a duration spanning from 4 to > 12 years, located in important vine production districts, representative of vine production in Central and North of Italy.
In particular, the project will study the influence of biochar on soil health, stabilization of soil C by carbon modeling, vine productivity, and will estimate the sustainability of biochar use in agriculture by life cycle analysis and circular economy approaches, to set out a credible pathway towards a more efficient, profitable and sustainable Italian viticulture.
Coordinator: Università degli Studi di Padova
Principal Investigator unibz: Carlo Andreotti - Faculty of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences
Project Duration: 12/10/2023 – 11/11/2025

20225TN2R9 — Italian borderscapes after 2020. Mapping, unfolding, and re-framing border territories in response to the Covid-19 pandemic

The project focuses on the ongoing transcalar territorial impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on “inner areas” located at Italy’s national borders. By shifting the perspective on these marginal territories from “peripheries” of intermediate or metropolitan urban systems, to “contact zones” between transnational territorial systems and communities and “new frontiers” in a post-Covid-19 recovery, the project proposes an interdisciplinary study of the cross-border constellations of spaces, relations and practices that have emerged as forms of resilience to the pandemic, situating them into larger geographies and territorial systems across the border.
The aim is to understand, map and envision the complex entanglement between novel forms of re-bordering and de-bordering pushed by the sanitary situation, as well as considering the new opportunities of (in)formal trans-boundary collaborations between local communities and actors.
Coordinator: Politecnico di Milano
Principal Investigator unibz: Ingrid Kofler - Faculty of Design and Art
Project Duration: 18/10/2023 – 17/11/2025