TRANSFORM

Project Background: The pace of agricultural innovation needs to increase to reflect the acceleration of CC. Some irreversible tipping-points of CC are predicted within a decade. This is not long. In a recent Science & Society article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (Bohan et al. 2022), we argue that to adapt to CC on these timescales it will be necessary to develop methods that accelerate innovation to deliver the services and benefits of agriculture required by society. The TRANSFORM project hypothesises that this can be achieved through five independent activities. The first activity is to work with 4+ Regions (NUTS2) to formulate the (social, economic, ecosystem services and biodiversity) criteria that allow them to meet their roadmaps for the adaptation to CC in agriculture. We will work with Regions in the Atlantic Biogeographical regions of Europe. These will be in northern Spain (Galicia), France (Bourgogne-Franche- Comté), Germany (Braunschweig) and Denmark (Syddanmark), with the possibility of working in South East or South West of England if there is participation

by partners from the United Kingdom.

The second, is for farmers to innovate, via farmer-led agroecology, rotations that achieve their agronomic and economic goals for adaptation to CC. For the third activity, scientists model the social and economic benefits, ecosystem services and biodiversity expected for the innovated rotations using existing methods. In the fourth activity, all appropriate stakeholders in agriculture evaluate the model predictions, selecting those farmer-led innovations that contribute to the Regional roadmaps and assure acceptable, cost-effective CC adaptation. Importantly, for transparency, this evaluation is not done by the Region but rather by independent

stakeholders against the Region’s roadmap. The final activity is mapping (spatial and temporal forecasts) the effects of the innovated rotations that are acceptable, to allow the regions, farmers and all stakeholders to communicate the benefits of adoption of the rotations to the public, optimise their roadmaps, and monitor adoption and impact on CC adaptation and resilience. The basket of tools and methods developed by TRANSFORM, as part these activities, will produce innovation for rotations in agriculture in a manner that is transparent, acceptable and rapid, and that may be rolled out to all Regions and ~6 million farms of the EU.

Objectives & Impact

• Climate-resilient rotations that deliver the agronomic, economic and environmental ES outcomes we as a society want (e.g. nature-based solutions); validated and demonstrated in 4+ NUTS2 Regions.
• Tools for farmers to innovate new rotations rapidly and acceptably, and for the Regions and Industry to integrate these into planning for and mapping of sustainable, resilient futures.
• Methods for EU-national- and regional-scale structures, such as the EEA and JRC, to monitor and map change in outcomes (modified rotations, ES, biodiversity, etc.) in an automated fashion.
• New avenues of future agroecological research with CC, linked to exploring the farmer-led scenarios.