Multiagri

MULTAGRI will investigate how governance of agricultural landscapes can promote rural development by harnessing landscape and biological diversity as assets to promote the provisioning of public goods and sustainable intensification of agricultural production. We will do this by: * Determining empirically the spatial scale affecting a number of key farmland ecosystem services * Determining synergies and trade-offs between production of public goods and generation of supporting/regulating ecosystem services. * Valuing ecosystem services and public goods produced by European farms as a result of ecological intensification. * Modelling how payments for public goods and ecosystem services will affect regional agricultural development. * Assessing the multi-level governance system under which European farmers operate to understand how and why farmers choose to adopt specific management actions at farm and landscape scales. * Evaluating how European agricultural policies can contribute to more sustainable farming systems with payments for public goods and ecosystem services. * Disseminating project results effectively to both the scientific community and to stakeholders, particularly policy makers and farmers, but even the general public. To this end MULTAGRI coordinates scientific expertise across disciplinary divides and across European rural landscapes, to promote cross-disciplinary interaction among natural and social scientists and science-policy dialogue through mutual transdisciplinary interaction with stakeholders. The end product will be a synthesis: Governing rural land use and landscapes to support sustainable development.