AGROECOL 1 SAFER Strengthening Agricultural landscape multiFunctionality through expansion of agroecological farming in EuRope (SAFER)

Across Europe, it has become clear that current farming practices are unsustainable, and that farming systems must be re-designed to sustain food production while protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and the many benefits they bring to society. One solution to this is agroecology. Agroecological farming takes many forms but is underpinned by a common principle; to harness natural ecological processes to make farming more sustainable. Unfortunately, despite much research into agroecological farming practices the adoption of agroecology is very limited in Europe. In the SAFER project a large team of European researchers will work across a network of 6 'Living Labs', i.e. real farms across Europe in which agroecological practices are being implemented. In these, they will co-create knowledge with farmers and other relevant stakeholders. This knowledge will detail the agricultural, environmental and social-ecological benefits, but also the potential trade-offs between benefits (e.g. between biodiversity protection and crop production), that agroecological practices bring. The University of Bergen team, led by Prof. Peter Manning, will play a key role in this project. Their contribution will be to scale up field and farm level data from across the project to whole landscapes, and to simulate changes in farm practices using a combination of social science, remote sensing and mathematical modelling. These will create forecasts of the whole-system consequences of landscape-scale farming strategies for farmers and local stakeholders. The end product will be detailed knowledge on how different ecological practices affect farmers and rural communities and the identification of strategies that increase sustainable production and multifunctionality in European agricultural landscapes. By actively involving farmers and other relevant stakeholders throughout the research process we also aim to increase the relevance and adoption of the solutions identified.

Agroecology offers an opportunity to reconcile agricultural production with human well-being across Europe. However, despite significant evidence that agroecological farming reduces the environmental footprint of agriculture, agroecology is struggling to expand across Europe. This limited adoption emerges from a limited understanding of the cross-disciplinary impacts (agronomic, ecological, economic and social dimensions) of upscaling agroecological farming and recent social unrest following the deployment of agroecological policies indicates that there is an urgent need to address this issue. In addition, a major challenge for agroecology is that no single agroecological practice is suitable for all contexts. Instead, practices need to be targeted and adapted to local socio-ecological contexts, with a strong involvement of stakeholders. Addressing such challenge implies a paradigm shift towards co-design in research and innovation in agroecology. SAFER will address these challenges by mobilizing a European network of 6 Living Labs distributed across contrasting regions and social-ecological systems, in a multidisciplinary approach. We will: (i) co-design best suited agroecological practices adapted to local social-ecological conditions via a participatory approach that actively involves stakeholders; (ii) quantify the multiple agronomical, environmental and socio-economic benefits and risks of scaling up these agroecological practices from the field to the landscape scale using a similar landscape-scale design across Living Labs; (iii) forecast the whole-system consequences of landscape-scale strategies for farmers and local stakeholders; (iv) identify how local policies, stakeholder demands and the Living Lab methodology can enhance or limit the expansion of agroecological practices Work at UiB will concentrate on modelling work in (ii) and (iii) but will contribute to all aspects.