TRANSFORM

The environmental sustainability of the Regions of the EU is inextricably linked to the climate resilience of agriculture. Climate modelling and observation suggest that the performance of common agricultural crops will decline, severely affecting livelihoods of arable farmers and agricultural continuity. This will detrimentally impact economic and food security, biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES), and individual and societal wellbeing. Regional resilience and sustainability is therefore inseparably linked to the continuity of agriculture (Bohan et al. 2022). Approximately 6 million farms (98.9 million Ha in 2020) in the EU use crop rotations (agronomic sequences of crops) as the key tool of arable crop management for economic food, fibre and fuel production. New rotations, will need to be innovated if the Regions are to deliver on their roadmaps and assure tangible climate resilience, and the economic, social and environmental outcomes that society demands. 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), the TRANSFORM consortium 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. 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.