New grant for Strengthening Agricultural Landscape Multifunctionality
Peter Manning was awarded an NFR grant as part of the transnational Agroecology Partnership program.
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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 聽be re-designed to sustain food production while protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and the many benefits they 聽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 聽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.