Agroforestry (AF) has already proven its potential for farm sustainability, climate change mitigation & adaptation, biodiversity preservation, and soil conservation. However, AF performances are context-dependent, and many barriers hinder its adoption, such as lack of tools for decision-making, assessing economic, environmental, social benefits, and monitoring of policies and their impact on AF. DigitAF will boost AF implementation in the EU and beyond thanks to the co-development of digital tools tailored to the needs and concerns of DigitAF target groups.
To engage actors whose decisions impact AF implementation, DigitAF will:
(1) Support policy-actors at various scales to design more efficient policies supporting AF adoption & carbon farming;
(2) Provide tools helping practitioners (farmers…) deal with the complexity of AF systems. DigitAF will allow them to optimize the design and management of agroforestry systems at field and farm scale;
(3) Enhance capacities of actors to assess, quantify and market the economic, environmental and social performance and benefits of AF.
The end-user centred multi-actor approach of DigitAF will be made possible by implementing 6 living labs (LL) in Italy, Germany, Netherland, United Kingdom, Finland and the Czech Republic. Open-source tools will be co-developed thanks to the existing or novel practical knowledge, scientific evidence and models. They will be tested with the endusers from LL and improved thanks to their feedback. Larger dissemination to target groups will be ensured through DigitAF partners gathering members and networks across EU.
The DigitAF consortium brings together 25 partners from 20 countries from the EU, Associated Countries and beyond, composed of RTOs (9), universities (5), SMEs (6), European and international organisations (4), NGO and cooperative (1). DigitAF consortium and the LL cover all AF value chain actors, thus efficiently supporting AF implementation in the EU.
EFI will contribute to WP1 Agroforestry policies, WP3 Accounting agroforestry benefits, WP4 Living labs and a common agroforestry toolbox, and WP5 Dissemination, communication and exploitation.
Project website will be at: www.digitaf.eu
Press release: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digitafs-press-release-digitafproject
Follow the project on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/digitafproject/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/DigitAFproject
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation programme under grant agreement N°101059794.