Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing its environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. In current food systems many of the costs of harmful foods and benefits of healthful foods are externalized, i.e. are not reflected in market prices and therefore not in decision making of actors in food value chains. Solving the externality problems means to determine current costs of externalities and redefine food prices (true pricing) to internalize them in daily practice. Policy makers, businesses and other actors in the food system, lack sufficient information and knowledge to internalize externalities to achieve a sustainable food system. FOODCoST responds to this challenge by designing a roadmap for effective and sustainable strategies to assess and internalise food externalities. FOODCoST provides approaches and databases to measure and value positive and negative externalities, proposing a game-changing and harmonised approach to calculate the value of climate, biodiversity, environmental, social and health externalities along the food value chain based on economic cost principles. FOODCoST provides an analytical toolbox to experiment, analyse, and navigate the internalisation of externalities through policies and business strategies providing tools and guidance to policy makers and businesses to assess the sustainability impact of their internalisation actions. FOODCoST emphasises the diversity of challenges of true pricing in different value chains and countries and regions, and cocreates, tests and validates the valuation and internalisation approaches in 11 diverse case studies enabling to test, validate and enrich the approaches in order to transit towards a sustainable food system. The project will be based on a multi-actor approach that will ensure a continuous dialogue with all relevant actors across the whole food system (land and sea).

SafeHabitus will make farming a safer occupation. Farming is amongst the most dangerous jobs in Europe. European statistics show that the fatality rate in farming is 233% higher than other industries and the accident rate is 18% higher. These figures underestimate the scale of the problem as a significant proportion of farm workplace fatalities, injuries and ill health go unreported, un-investigated, and prevention approaches are not learned. Improving farmers’ and farm workers’ health and safety requires action by a range of stakeholders to empower and support them to change unsafe practices and adopt new, safer and healthier ways of working. SafeHabitus is a multi-actor project that has come together to strengthen Farm Health and Safety Knowledge Innovation Systems (FHS KIS) and support the EU transition to social sustainability in farming. Our premise is that driving health and safety on farms is not about dissemination but changing habitual practices. To achieve this, SafeHabitus applies a range of novel methods; digital story telling methods with people who experienced accidents; application of the multi-actor approach to co-design farm work risk management tools; foresight analysis; analyses of consumer willingness to pay for food production that protects health and safety; bench-marking policies and elite interviews with policy makers. Our consortia include end-users, stakeholders and researchers in case study Member States. These work together in ten national COPs covering a representative variety of countries and sectors. SafeHabitus also engages with European bodies and stakeholders who provide critical bridges between EU and national / regional actors and who can influence EU policy such as the Geopa (Copa-Cogeca), CEJA, EFFAT, Oxfam, SVLFG, and AEIDL. This multi-level and transnational approach will allow SafeHabitus advance safer practices on farms across the EU.

GRASS Ceiling will develop a context where women can drive socio-ecological transitions, that is, develop innovations in response to socio-ecological challenges and strengthen the resilience of rural areas. This is essential to deliver the UN’s goals on gender parity, realise the EU gender equality strategy, and achieve the goals of the Green Deal, the Farm to Fork strategy, the Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas and the European Pillar of Social Rights. GRASS CEILING is a multi-actor project that will increase women-led socio-ecological innovations in farming, the rural economy and in rural communities (i.e., smart-agri skills, eco-tourism, pasture led agriculture, organic cheese, energy neutral village halls, community gardens, elderly care cooperatives). Socio-ecological innovation in farming and rural areas is a developing area in Europe, and GRASS Ceiling will co-create tools to ensure women can fully participate. Our consortia include end-users (women innovators), stakeholders and researchers in case study Member States, as well as European bodies and stakeholders who can influence EU policy such as the EU Women’s Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP), Copa-Cogeca (EU representatives of farmers and agri-cooperatives), The European Association for Information on Local Development (AEIDL), and the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). GRASS Ceiling brings together leading academic partners with many years of experience in research and practice projects that seek to empower and support women in agriculture and rural areas throughout a variety of contexts in Europe. The project involves women-innovators on farms and in rural areas who will participate in our 9 socio-ecological women innovator living labs in 9 case study countries. Our Living Labs are practical, women-led, interactive innovation initiatives that will increase knowledge and provide tools to assist women innovators and policy and support organisations at Member State and EU level.

In line with the new CAP post2020, the F2F Strategy and the Green Deal, the EU4Advice Project will develop enabling methodologies and tools to connect short food supply chains (SFSCs) advisors in a common network with the aim of fostering the upscaling of consumer-producer chains across Europe. SFSCs are a mean for producers to increase their bargaining power and to improve their position within the value chain and for consumers to increase trust, transparency, quality and safety of their food. Political and socio-economic barriers and gaps need to be addressed in order to enhance the scope of consumer-producer chains across Europe and EU4Advice will provide the necessary tools to the relevant stakeholders to overcome them. One key challenge to achieve this goal is to improve national AKIS by implementing new governance models that facilitates the integration of SFSCs advisory services Through a multi-actor approach involving advisors, policy makers, researchers, farmers and consumers, and by implementing a living lab methodology, EU4Advice will create the foundations for the establishment of a network of SFSC-advisors across Europe that will be appropriately structured and connected to a diversity of stakeholders within the national AKIS. The development of networking tools, contents for SFSCs advisors, a tailored dissemination, communication and exploitation strategy, and impact assessment plans will create the appropriate ecosystem for the effective transfer of knowledge among stakeholders in the 27 EU members. Based on previous key related multi-actor projects, EU4Advice will apply the “GAIN transition model” to guide the successful implementation of the multi-actor network through different administrative levels: local, regional, national and European. EU4Advice will establish appropriate channels for collaboration and knowledge exchange among a selected group of multi-actor projects, thematic networks and focus groups at EU level, to ensure a long term impact

GAEA is a forward-looking project, aiming to improve the quality of entrepreneurship education in the agriculture sector for young women not in employment, not in training (NEETs) living in rural areas. Aligned with the latest EU priorities, GAEA is fully encompassing the priority of sustainable development and green transition. The project is also aligned with the EU' Common Agricultural Policy. The project’s main aim is to provide a solid connection basis amongst the sector’s key stakeholders, through the introduction of a one-stop-shop digital platform. The platform, will include a number of key training material, industry links, mentorship and coaching opportunities, and a highly innovative AI-powered application which will give the opportunity to young women to assess their skills based on ESCO classification. The multidisciplinary partnership, represented by 13 partners in 10 EU countries, will deliver a pan-European digital ecosystem for young women agri-preneurs, developed in such a manner that it can be sustained and further developed after the 3-year project duration. GAEA will place special emphasis on delivering an innovative, hybrid approach towards learning based on both physical, practical training and on digital training, through a digital platform. The platform will be embedded with a highly innovative AI mobile application, which will offer the trainees the opportunity to perform a skills-assessment; powered by AI technology, the trainees will have access to an accurate skill-profiling, which will be used as a basis to select the best matching career for them. The project will also feature a highly interactive face-to-face bootcamp, addressed both to trainers and trainees from all participating partnership countries, which will have as a main aim to transfer skills and knowledge in the areas of agriculture & entrepreneurship, through innovative approaches. The project is comprised of 9 WPs, aiming to deliver the project’s innovative training programme, the digital platform, the bootcamp and a well-structured policy recommendation report. Three WPs are horizontal, and relate to Project Management, Dissemination, and Quality Assurance. The consortium to implement this project is a cluster of various respectable entities in the educational, entrepreneurial, agricultural, technological and research sectors from all over Europe. Therefore, the partners come from the Southern Europe (Cyprus-Greece-Spain) Central Europe (Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia) and Northern Europe (Norway) resulting to a very geographically balanced team, thus tackling the project’s aspirations in EU widely.