Brussels, 12/12/2003 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday in Brussels, the European Commission published the first results of the new ERA-NET scheme with an allocation of EUR 149 million from the Community budget. Its aim is to place national research programmes into a network. During the first phase, 32 promising cross-border initiatives were selected for funding. These include projects that cover the coordination of medical emergency intervention in Europe, research on population ageing, and marine sciences in the Baltic Sea. ERA-NET encourages the cooperation and the coordination of national financing programmes and R&D, mainly in order to deal with the problems that Member States cannot resolve alone. The scheme also encourages national administrations to launch joint research projects benefiting from EU co-financing. It is thus a question of avoiding the dispersion and duplication of research efforts by Member States - the main obstacle to the creation of the European Research Area, the real internal market for science and knowledge, a Commission press release states.