DISTENDER will provide integrated strategies by building a methodological framework that guide the integration of climate change (CC) adaptation and mitigation strategies through participatory approaches in ways that respond to the impacts and risks of climate change (CC), supported by quantitative and qualitative analysis that facilitates the understanding of interactions, synergies and trade-offs. Holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation must be tailored to the context-specific situation and this requires a flexible and participatory planning process to ensure legitimate and salient action, carried out by all important stakeholders. DISTENDER will develop a set of multi-driver qualitative and quantitative socio-economic-climate scenarios through a facilitated participatory process that integrates bottom-up knowledge and locally-relevant drivers with top-down information from the global European Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and downscaled Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from IPCC. A cross-sectorial and multi-scale impact assessment modelling toolkit will be developed to analyse the complex interactions over multiple sectors, including an economic evaluation framework. The economic impact of the different efforts will be analyse, including damage claim settlement and how do sectoral activity patterns change under various scenarios considering indirect and cascading effects. It is an innovative project combining three key concepts: cross-scale, integration/harmonization and robustness checking. DISTENDER will follow a pragmatic approach applying methodologies and toolkits across a range of European case studies (six core case studies and five followers) that reflect a cross-section of the challenges posed by CC adaptation and mitigation. The knowledge generated by DISTENDER will be offered by a Decision Support System (DSS) which will include guidelines, manuals, easy-to-use tools and experiences from the application of the cases studies.

The objective of the ResAlliance is to facilitate information and knowledge flow and increase the awareness, understanding and capacity of farmers and foresters on landscape resilience in Mediterranean countries. More specifically, ResAlliance will gather and assess knowledge and practice needs, gaps, barriers, solutions and good practices to achieve resilient landscapes, with special emphasis on measures against hazards caused by climate change. It will also prepare and facilitate stakeholder engagement through interactive and innovative participation methods. It will finally transfer the knowledge and activate regional landscape resilience governance, with special emphasis in five Mediterranean regions. ResAlliance will create and animate a Mediterranean thematic network on landscape resilience (“LandNet”) for forestry and agriculture. The LandNet will continuously identify, engage and grow new cooperation and networks to access, improve and increase the knowledge of solutions and good practices. The LandNet will prepare the context-specific knowledge and engage and train farmers, foresters and other key stakeholders for knowledge transfer of managerial, technological, financial or governance solutions. The work programme will allow capturing and interpreting most urgent needs while identifying and coupling unknown best practices in research and practice with these needs; compiling a comprehensive description of the state of current farming and forestry practices on landscape resilience to summarise and explain the added-value, the relevance and the cost/benefit aspects of the practices collected, avoiding duplication; delivering an extensive range of useful, applicable, appealing and easy-to-access material in many formats, including EIP-AGRI, EU FarmBook and existing dissemination channels most consulted by farmers and foresters in the countries; and building synergies with OGs and innovation groups from EIP-AGRI, and implement multi-actor approach.

The European Commission is developing the first EU-wide voluntary framework for certifying carbon removals, carbon farming and carbon storage in products across Europe. By establishing EU quality criteria and laying down monitoring and reporting processes, the CRCF Regulation will facilitate the adoption of carbon farming solutions, while addressing greenwashing, and provides a "result-based" (quantified) remuneration system for farmers and foresters' climate performance. Key to the CRCF regulation are robust cost-effective Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems and a geographically explicit registry. Therefore, the main goal of CAFAMORE is to develop an EU-wide parcel level monitoring approach for Carbon Farming, with harmonisation and automation of data collection, robust and cost-effective quantification of activities and baselines, a spatially explicit registry and a robust market place. This will be accompanied by an in-depth assessment of the carbon markets and business strategies for carbon farming. CAFAMORE will facilitate certification schemes by providing tools for the quantification and monitoring of Carbon Farming activities through providing operational processing chains that connect earth observation data, soil and management data and models, including changes in SOC stocks, woody biomass and soil N2O emissions. This parcel-level data collection infrastructure can also serve companies for their CSRD reporting and member states for their National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. The MRV approaches and tools will be tested with farmers and certification actors in seven pilot countries, covering the main climatic zones and the diversity in European agriculture. The digital infrastructure and MRV tools will reduce the administrative burden for land managers, provide transparency over collected data and certificates and trust to the Carbon Farming market, which should increase the attractiveness of carbon farming.

Agroforestery (AF) has already proven its potential for farm sustainability, climate change mitigation & adaptation, biodiversity preservation, and soil conservation. However, AF performances are context-dependent, and many barriers hinder its adoption, such as lack of tools for decision-making, assessing economic, environmental, social benefits, and monitoring of policies and their impact on AF. DigitAF will boost AF implementation in the EU and beyond thanks to the co-development of digital tools tailored to the needs and concerns of DigitAF target groups. To engage actors whose decisions impact AF implementation,DigitAF will: (1) Support policy-actors at various scales to design more efficient policies supporting AF adoption & carbon farming; (2) Provide tools helping practitioners (farmers…) deal with the complexity of AF systems. DigitAF will allow them to optimize the design and management of agroforestry systems at field and farm scale; (3) Enhance capacities of actors to assess, quantify and market the economic, environmental and social performance and benefits of AF. The end-user centred multi-actor approach of DigitAF will be made possible by implementing 6 living labs (LL) in Italy, Germany, Netherland, United Kingdom, Finland and the Czech Republic. Open-source tools will be co-developed thanks to the existing or novel practical knowledge, scientific evidence and models. They will be tested with the end-users from LL and improved thanks to their feedback. Larger dissemination to target groups will be ensured through DigitAF partners gathering members and networks across EU. DigitAF consortium brings together 25 partners from 20 countries from the EU, Associated Countries and beyond, composed of RTOs (9), universities (5), SMEs (6), European and international organisations (4), NGO and cooperative (1). DigitAF consortium and the LL cover all AF value chain actors, thus efficiently supporting AF implementation in the EU.