Enabling agroecological transition in Europe- Agroecology-TRANSECT

Funding: Funded by the European Commission, Horizon Europe program

Coordinator: INRAE, National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (France)

Time period: September 2022 – 2026.

Consortium partners: The Consortium is composed of 19 partners from 12 European countries, two of these countries, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, being outside the EU.

agroecology-transect.net

Trans-disciplinary approaches for systemic economic, ecological, and climate change transitions.

Agroecology-TRANSECT aims to contribute to releasing the full potential of agroecology for European agriculture by strengthening the knowledge base for farmers and advisors and supporting decision-makers. It aims to deliver robust evidence of the benefits of agroecology on climate change mitigation, biodiversity, and farm socio-economic resilience.

To achieve these objectives, Agroecology-TRANSECT supports the transition to agroecology through co-innovation dynamics including a transdisciplinary collaboration between researchers (agronomy, animal sciences, ecology, sustainability sciences, socio-economics, and political sciences) and stakeholders and mobilisation of knowledge and expertise in 11 multi-actor Innovation Hubs (IHs) which have been engaged in agroecological transition for several years. The selected IHs reflect a diverse range of crop, animal, and integrated crop-livestock systems, biogeographical areas, and socio-economic European landscapes.

Agroecology-TRANSECT objectives

Agroecology-TRANSECT will:

deliver a tool to better quantify the benefits of agroecology for climate, biodiversity, and farm resilience;
identify drivers, barriers – including social norms – opportunities and solutions to enhance the adoption of agroecological principles; and,
launch a toolbox to deliver pragmatic recommendations for the implementation and expansion of agroecological practices by the farmers, advisors, policymakers, and other actors along the value chain.

The project will assess how policy instruments facilitate or limit the expansion of agroecology, and will provide a comprehensive set of scale-specific policy recommendations for unfolding the potential of agroecology from regional to EU levels.

By overcoming current bio-technical, social, and political lock-ins, Agroecology-TRANSECT will support the achievement of relevant targets of key EU policies such as the Common Agricultural Policy, the Green Deal, and the Farm to Fork Strategy.

ÖMKi is involved in the following tasks:

ÖMKi’s role is to co-lead a transformative learning platform (WP3) comprised of 11 Innovation Hubs with the Wageningen University across Europe and to monitor the unfolding of the agroecological potential of AE practices in the Innovation Hubs as part of their socio-technical systems. ÖMKi also brings into the project its ’Cover crop seed mixture for vineyards and orchard’ LL as an Innovation Hub from Hungary.

Moreover, ÖMKi leads a communication task in the project focusing on the EU-wide engagement,events, webinars, and on developing Agroecology-TRANSECT Masterclasses.