When conceiving plans for environmentally friendly agriculture, policy makers and scientists often overlook a key element: the spatial organization of land use. Specifically for circular agriculture, the spatial organization is important, as the closer the source and destination of residues are located, the better loops can be closed at minimum risk and cost. The project Spatial PLanning for ENvironmentally DIverse circular Development (SPLENDID) provides policy makers with a scientific valid methodology to assess the spatial implications of implementing circular agricultural practices. It also looks at barriers and solutions to overcome these. This allows policy makers to realize circularity visions with a clear attention for all important landscape values. SPLENDID investigates how circular options match with their surroundings and what ecosystem services (ES) they yield in their geographical context. In Noord-Brabant – a Dutch province which exemplifies a range of agriculture-related sustainability issues – SPLENDID assesses three types of circular agriculture (nature-based, technology-based and transport-based), their spatial organization and the ES they deliver. Circular agriculture probably requires a rigorous reorganization of the land use pattern, leading to farmers adjusting their farming practices, swapping land with other land owners or even relocating the entire farm to achieve geographical zones with farming and processing facilities ideally located to optimize the benefits of food production and related ES like animal welfare, preservation of biodiversity, landscape quality and water retention. SPLENDID will produce clear policy guidelines for realizing these objectives.

Rural-urban regions feel an increasing need for landscape services such as clean drinking water, recreational space and space for living and working. While these demands are greatest in cities, the potential to provide these services is greatest in rural areas. It is possible to manage this - under the right preconditions - but it does require spatial interventions, strong policies and the financial-organizational matching of supply and demand. Landscape services can thus form the necessary extra link in the transformation towards sustainability, contributing to a more beautiful landscape and fertile soils for current and future generations.

Small-scale and bottom-up initiatives, and incremental urban development dominate various political agendas. These initiatives, termed Community-Linked Incremental Urban Developments (CLIUDs) here, remain underexplored. CLIUDs evolve around the concept of linking social capital with an emphasis on the capacity of citizens and community to engage with those in power. It remains unclear how these increasingly popular new initiatives and alliances connect with long-term social and spatial issues of accessibility, urban vitality, inclusiveness, sustainability and economic competitiveness. In fact, discrepancies exist between CLIUDs and the necessary level of scale, time frame and governance for resolving strategic urban challenges. R-LINK aims to find smart solutions to address economic, social and environmental challenges through spatial transformations. These transformations affect and contest conventional urban development and governance models, thus requiring new action perspectives. R-LINK proposes to bridge the gap between the practice of large-scale, strategic urban ambitions and policies and that of the new alliances (government, market or citizen initiated) for CLIUDs. R-LINK is designed in close collaboration with practitioners and relevant stakeholders. Its implementation brings together scientists, the public sector, civil society and market players. This ensures co-creation of new knowledge and a practical focus. At the same time, the multidisciplinary expertise within the consortium enables fresh intellectual and transdisciplinary insights to be developed on the issue of how to realize strategic urban ambitions through CLIUDs and how to improve existing practices.

Energy communities (ECs) are seen as one of the cornerstones of the sustainable energy transition. Yet, ECs’ success is limited by two main factors: (1) grid capacity at distribution system level, and (2) the ability and willingness of people, public and private entities to engage in joint activities in the energy sector by means of forming a “community”. This project investigates whether “mobile” ECs, based on electrical vehicles, can address these limitations. Specifically, electrical vehicles provide opportunities for: (1) energy transport outside the fixed grid, and (2) broadening the range of communities that can form ECs.

Castor is Latin for beaver. Beavers, like humans, transform land and water systems in river landscapes. CASTOR investigates realistic future landscape configurations, and pathways towards these futures. Pathways towards future landscapes are relevant because current well-intended management actions result in patchworks of interventions. Yet, fragmentation – spatial, temporal and in governance – constrains adaptive capacity, restricting responses to climate change and shifting societal demands. By offering actionable knowledge on future landscapes and pathways towards these, CASTOR supports regional adaptation strategies. Because landscape futures are shaped by natural physical processes in interaction with human interventions, CASTOR takes a learning approach – in living labs. The sandy-soil regions of south and east Netherlands particularly demand analysis at the landscape level, because the high permeability of sandy soils compounds the many interdependencies between land and water users. Impacts of, for example, droughts are severely felt and require a comprehensive response. We conceptualize the physical and human components of land and water use processes as complex adaptive systems and explore change dynamics. The non-linear behavior of these systems challenges decision-making. At the same time, the values society attributes to land and water systems are shifting, and stakeholders’ expectations for the future increasingly diverge. Adaptation planners need to know what interventions they can implement, when and where to achieve a climate-resilient living environment. Working with stakeholders, CASTOR pursues nature-based approaches towards climate-resilient land and water systems. A key innovation is the combination of complex adaptive systems approaches with living labs initiated under the Lumbricus program (www.programmalumbricus.nl), which will be continued at the landscape level under the new Top Sector Alliance (TKI) KLIMAP. This offers excellent opportunities to integrate local and scientific knowledge with experimentation and planning. The CASTOR approach is transferable to other landscapes for which alternative futures can be foreseen under global change.