The EU aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by at least 55% by 2030. This ambition requires fast mitigation measures within all sectors. Paludiculture is the productive land use of wet and rewetted peatlands and can reduce GHG emissions by up to 70-80%. It thus has a large potential to support the EU’s climate targets and biodiversity strategy and still provide farmers and landowners with income, but only if the practice is scaled up. Currently, there are too few large-scale sites involving local actors that demonstrate industrial scale paludiculture farming models. PaluWise's 4 large-scale paludiculture sites in Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom will showcase best practices and solutions for converting degraded organic soils to paludiculture. They develop field-scale operations and their associated five value chains (crops: Downy Birch, Reed, Sedges, Typha, Reed Canary Grass). By having two established (NL, UK) and two new sites (FI, PL), PaluWise can demonstrate different stages of paludiculture and associated value chains, emphasising replicability and scalability. Network sites (e.g., PaludiZentrale, Germany) will provide lessons learnt guidance and engage actors in innovating improvements (e.g. maintaining high water levels, adapting machinery, choosing suitable crop species). A multi-actor approach is applied to co-innovate and improve cost-effective, climate smart value chains. Activities cover the full sequence from deciding where to set up a site (WP1 decision support tool for rewettability), what works well in a site (WP2 demos), what are the benefits/impacts in emission reduction, carbon sequestration potential, biodiversity and other ecosystem services at landscape scale (WP3, WP4), and how to upscale and get support (WP5). We will identify barriers and provide recommendations to boost improved policy and legislation for large-scale deployment of paludiculture in Europe.

The Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” aims to pioneer, showcase, and accelerate the transition to healthy soils by 2030, supporting the long-term commitments at European and global level within the Green Deal and Sustainable Development Goals. Ultimately, the creation of 100 Living Labs (LLs) and Lighthouses (LHs) will accelerate the creation and uptake of solutions by land managers, showcase measurable increase in soil health, improved social capital and citizen awareness. SOILL – lead by ENoLL, the international association of certified LLs – aims to set up and run an effective, agile, transdisciplinary, capillary, open and fair one-stop-shop structure. This will coordinate, support, enlarge, and promote the network of 100 Soil Mission LLs and LLs, and ensure their co-created, user-centred, harmonized, reliable, impactful, replicable, and sustainable lead of the transition towards healthy soils across different settings, geographical and socio-economic contexts. To facilitate this, the SOILL action plan has been designed to be agile and ready to adapt to the specific needs and requirements of LLs and LHs (applicant and established) as well of the different actors relevant in the different ecosystems and value chains. SOILL will support the production, exchange, and integration of knowledge to be transformed into specific and specialised skills for expanding practice, social capital, and policies. SOILL will help established LLs and LHs - as well as regional and national stakeholders seen as potential applicants - in building peer-to-peer relationships to ensure that best practices, guidance, knowledge, and lessons learnt are meaningfully shared and that they can learn from each other and scale up implementation of innovative approaches. Alongside, SOILL will start, facilitate, and coordinate the interaction of the network in the wider framework of the soil-related ecosystems, engaging all relevant stakeholders at national, European, and international level.

WaterLANDS aims to enable an upscaling of the restoration of wetlands. Socio-economic factors, insufficient stakeholder engagement, lack of government commitment, lack of funding and inadequate exchange of knowledge of restoration methods have all been identified as barriers to successful restoration. Consequently, most restoration has been modest in scale, has occurred mainly where there is a single landowning or responsible organisation, and has often been undertaken principally for reasons of conservation. WaterLANDS will work to overcome these barriers. It includes both Action and Knowledge Sites, the former being the object of restoration upscaling, and the latter a source of best practice experience and knowledge. To provide for local support and sustainability, it will aim for the co-design of restoration with the on-going engagement of communities and stakeholders. It will investigate best practice in ecological restoration which meets both biodiversity and social objectives and for which restoration trajectories are specific to the physical and cultural context of the Action Sites. It will propose supportive governance structures appropriate to this process and to local and national circumstances. It will identify business models, economic incentives and international funding sources and tailor or direct these resources for each site. The project will pull this expertise and knowledge together in a co-creation work package. Process-indicators will be developed to enable on-going assessment of restoration success in terms of ecosystem services, socioeconomic embedding and financial sustainability, to ensure wide-scale restoration which catalyses scalability beyond the life of the WaterLANDS project.

Wetlands cover 5-8% of the world’s land area and have a huge capacity to sequester carbon (C). Healthy wetlands accumulate C effectively due to water-logged conditions promoting highly stable C content. The EU aims to cut GHG emissions by at least 55% by 2030.This ambition requires new GHG mitigation measures within all sectors including LULUCF sector, where wetlands as C rich ecosystem can contribute to efficiently to both EU's climate targets and biodiversity strategy. Currently there is still a high uncertainty prevails of wetlands’ spatial and C sink extent, as well as source estimates and sustainable alternatives in restoration. This hinders the efficient use of wetlands in C mitigation and adaptation in the context of other LULUCF mitigation options. We will advance the state-of-the-art on the geospatial knowledge base on wetlands and their use and degradation in Europe. We will apply a co-creation approach to develop procedural knowledge and find ways for integrating multiple targets, supporting more inclusive, community-based approaches to wetland restoration. Diverse novel experimental data on ecosystems’ responses to wetlands’ management and restoration regimes under different types of land-use and will be acquired and synthesised on biodiversity and other ecosystem services (BES). At the local level, Living Labs (LL) support and integrate interdisciplinary and multi-actor research on ecological, environmental, economic, and social issues. Models will be utilised to scale up experimental data from LLs, to gain an understanding of the potential impacts of upscaled wetland restoration options on BES provision, as well as changes in BES provision at the EU level for various policy-relevant time periods and the most policy-relevant CC mitigation and BD targets. We will assess the societal impacts of wetland restoration, especially on BES benefits and costs of different restoration approaches and wellbeing impacts at local, national, and EU levels.