BrightSpace: Designing a Roadmap for Effective and Sustainable Strategies for Assessing and Addressing the Challenges of EU Agriculture to Navigate within a Safe and Just Operating Space
Funding
European Commission
Duration
November 2022 - October 2027
Coordinator
- Stichting Wageningen Research, Netherlands (WR)
Participants
- Johann Heinrich von Thuenen-Instutut, Germany
- IIASA International Institute for Applied System Analysis, Austria
- EuroCARE GmbH, Germany
- INRAe, France
- University of Bonn, Germany
- UCSC Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy
- PBL Ministerie Van Infranstructuur en Waterstaat, Netherlands
- CITA Centro de Investigacion Technologia Agroalimentaria de Aragon, Spain
- CZU Ceska Zemedelska Univerzita of Prague, Czechia
- PLAB Planslabkft, Hungary
- WU Wageningen University, Netherlands
- JRC Brussels, Belgium
Overview
The European Green Deal, aims, among others, to increase the contribution of EU agriculture to climate change action, improve the management of natural resources, ensure a fair economic return for farmers, and reinforce the protection of biodiversity. EU agriculture and food practices are currently not on the right track to meet the Green Deal ambitions and objectives. These objectives are interdependent, and while often aligned, they may also compete. Synergies and trade-offs between socio-economic and environmental outcomes are brought together in the concept of a Safe and Just Operating Space (SJOS), where the Safe component reflects the bio-physical boundaries of the ecosystem and the Just component the requirements for the well-being of the involved people. Policy makers and opinion leaders often lack sufficient information to gauge the likely effects of a SJOS crises in their country. The BrightSpace collaboration responds to this challenge by designing effective and sustainable strategies to navigate within a SJOS. BrightSpace provides an analytical toolbox to experiment, analyse, and coordinate the effects of innovative technologies, governance structures, as well as short- and long-term policies related to agriculture, thereby allowing for the execution of consistent, coherent, and lasting strategies with the desired consequences. The project emphasises the diversity of challenges regarding the SJOS across countries and regions and delivers new empirical evidence on cause-effect relations between drivers and outcomes relevant for the SJOS. A harmonised data framework and modelling toolbox are developed for medium-term and forward-looking projections of possible SJOS futures by 2050 and beyond. The support for effective and sustainable actions will include the identification of critical pathways for technological, institutional and consumer-oriented options for EU policies in the areas of agriculture, climate change, trade, and energy.
Contributions of EuroCARE
- EuroCARE has a leading role in WP5, the “integrated toolbox”. In cooperation with the stakeholders a Brightspace medium-run baseline will be developed. For the longer period, alternative baselines (no climate change, only climate change, pessimistic combination) are created and presented to the stakeholders. Finally, an IT infrastructure for open-source and cloud-based access to the integrated toolbox and its result will be provided.
- In WP6, CAPRI’s modeling ability to address the “solution space” for EU agriculture to stay within the safe space will be enhanced. Options may cover improvements in the organic representation, the manure trade and biodiversity indicators.
- In WP8, WP9 and WP10, EuroCARE will contribute to the scenario work and related model adjustments aiming to outline a set of transition pathways for food and agriculture in the European Union within the Safe and Just Operating Space (SJOS).
- Finally, EuroCARE will contribute to the coordination and organisation of trainings in WP11.
