Presentation

Europe’s rich cultural heritage, with its common values, its wealth of monuments and sites and its creative diversity of traditions, crafts, arts, architecture, literature, languages, theatre, films and music, not only reflects our past but also shapes our present and builds our future. It is a creative way of cultivating independent thinking and dialogue, while promoting our interests across the world. Access to experience with cultural heritage contributes to social cohesion and inclusion, by strengthening resilience and the sense of belonging, bringing people together and improving well-being.

In the Pillar II Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness of the Horizon Europe, among the Cluster 2 Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society, the Destination: Innovative Research on European Cultural Heritage and Cultural and Creative Industries – Building Our Future from the Past adresses calls on the cultural heritage research and science.

These are the topics for 2025:

GREEN

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-03-HERITAGE-01: Co-funded European partnership for Resilient Cultural Heritage

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-02-HERITAGE-02 (two-stage): Innovative approaches to intangible cultural heritage for societal resilience

DIGITAL

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-03: A European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative use cases

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-04: Leveraging artificial intelligence for creativity-driven innovation

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-05: Evolution of culture in a virtualising world

INNOVATIVE

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-06: Europe as a global powerhouse of design for sustainable competitiveness

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-07: Cultural Strategies for Peace: culture and creativity as catalysts for conflict prevention and post-conflict reconciliation

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-08: Bridging historical past and future potential through conservation, preservation, and adaptive use of Europe’s contentious and dissonant heritage

  • HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-09: Impacts of culture and the arts on health and well-being

For details, please refer the Horizon Europe Work programme (2025) – Cluster 2.

Background

Horizon Europe is structured into three main pillars, Pillar I Excellent Science covers fundamental research funded by the European Research Council and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action, while Pillar III Innovative Europe is dedicated to improving Europe’s innovation ecosystem and to commercialising innovation. Under Pillar II, EU funding is provided to tackle global challenges and to boost Europe’s industrial competitiveness. That’s where the clusters come in. The structure of Horizon Europe lists a total of six clusters that are broken down into individual expected impacts around overarching themes. The six clusters are

  • Cluster 1: Health
  • Cluster 2: Culture, Creativity & Inclusive Society
  • Cluster 3: Civil Security for Society
  • Cluster 4: Digital, Industry & Space
  • Cluster 5: Climate, Energy & Mobility
  • Cluster 6: Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture & Environment

The clusters are subdivide into different Destinations where the specific directions and ultimate points of arrival Horizon Europe aims to achieve through the new impact-driven approach.