Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AFINET (Agroforestry Innovation Networks (AFINET))
Período documentado: 2018-07-01 hasta 2019-12-31
Agroforestry (AF) is the practice of deliberately integrating woody vegetation (trees or shrubs) with crop and/or animal systems to benefit from the resulting ecological and economic interactions. Existing research performed indicates that appropriate application of AF principles and practices is a key avenue to help the European Union to achieve more sustainable methods of food and fibre production that produce both profits for farmers and environmental benefits. AF is one of the most innovation-prone subjects in today’s agriculture, and its development is a cross-sectoral issue that should involve all landscape users and stakeholders (farmers, foresters, river conservationists, bee-keepers, landscapers, hunting associations, roads & pathways departments...). Efficient innovation in AF implies a tight interaction between fundamental research and on-field practical experience that pioneer farmers (and other field-operators) are acquiring every day, by complementing the most advanced modern knowledge with proven traditional practices. Multi-partner initiatives have been launched here and there to encourage collaborative innovation through pooling of resources, exchanges of views and ideas and risk sharing. Success stories have started to emerge; however there is still a lot to be done with up-scaling and out-scaling of these local promising dynamics, which highlights the importance of empowering and connecting them. This was efficiently done by establishing the AFINET network at European level to reveal, foster, and transfer high-level AF innovations, as well as calling public attention to the on-going agricultural transition. In the end, the AFINET initiative was the start point of greatly contribute to simultaneously increasing productivity and sustainability in agriculture, forestry and rural areas; put in practice insufficiently exploited research results; capture and spread innovative ideas from practices; and close the research and innovation divide in agriculture, forestry and rural areas.
The overall objective of AFINET is the promotion and innovation of European Agroforestry (AF) through the development of a multi-actor interactive and innovation-driven network, based on successful sharing of practical experiences and existing research knowledge, applied to different contexts, climates and agricultural sectors. AFINET created a social network of 1500 farmers across Europe presenting the main AF challenges and innovations to overcome these challenges grouped as technical, economical, educational and environmental. Innovations were grouped in the alive handbook and information can be searched and updated in the knowledge cloud. AFINET is the start poing to modify AF systems design and management in order to increase the agricultural systems production and profitability to promote a sustainable land management throughout Europe.
The overall objective of AFINET is the promotion and innovation of European Agroforestry (AF) through the development of a multi-actor interactive and innovation-driven network, based on successful sharing of practical experiences and existing research knowledge, applied to different contexts, climates and agricultural sectors. AFINET created a social network of 1500 farmers across Europe presenting the main AF challenges and innovations to overcome these challenges grouped as technical, economical, educational and environmental. Innovations were grouped in the alive handbook and information can be searched and updated in the knowledge cloud. AFINET is the start poing to modify AF systems design and management in order to increase the agricultural systems production and profitability to promote a sustainable land management throughout Europe.
AFINET project development has been carried out in due order following the Grant agreement during the whole period of the project. Nine successful extensive Regional Innovation Networks (RAINs) were created in 9 countries with a large number of participants (over 800). RAINs provided a large number of challenges and innovations that should be developed in order to overcome the main drawbacks to foster AF in Europe, most of them common to several RAINs of the participant countries. The innovations were grouped in four main categories: technical, economical, education and policy. Innovations conducted to the development of materials stored in a specific AF reservoir called knowledge cloud (KC) linked to AFINET that will be the basis to upload information by stakeholders in different AF languages in Europe. The Dissemination materials were developed to maximize the impact through the production of adapted materials to different types of stakeholders. The AF stakeholders request to provide solutions to the policy challenges conducted to a quite intense and successful development of policy recommendations. The most important networking activities are linked to the EIP-Agri activities as contacts with several thematic networks have been established to identify good agroforestry practices and 20 agroforestry operational groups linked to the Rural National Networks have been identified, besides the recent supraregional Spanish operational group linked to the mapping of agroforestry good practices and associated to EU thematic networks (Nefertiti, Agri-Demo, PLAID, Inno4grass and Skin). A focus group of Agroforestry was also promoted from AFINET. Several successful communication campaigns have been carried out. The large number of AF interested people reached (over a million) demonstrates a successful communication programme, while the timely release of the AFINET newsletter in the 9 EU languages of the AFINET participant countries have been a good start to disseminate key activities linked to agroforestry in Europe. The social media network of above 1500 stakeholders will be kept and enlarged by the USC..
The establishment of an AF networking of stakeholders in Europe is key to increase agroforestry sustainability in Europe. The fact that over the 90% of the arable crops, permanent grasslands and permanent crops are suitable to use agroforestry reveals the enormous potential that AF (Mosquera-Losada et al. 2018) has in Europe to improve biodiversity, water quality and both mitigate and adapt farming systems to climate change (Mosquera-Losada et al. 2018). AFINET set the first steps to establish this AF network in nine European countries with above 800 participants and expand the networking to other countries (i.e The Netherlands) and the knowledge cloud as a key place where stakeholders can share the AF recent advances and good practices in their own languages all over Europe. The work carried out by the RAINs identified over 100 innovations to be developed and allowed to find around 20 AF Operational groups linked to Rural National Networks, mostly from regions outside of the RAINs. The AFINET web site where the Knowledge cloud was placed is visited for an enourmous number of stakeholders interested in AF. The next AFINET steps dealing with the delivery of all dissemination materials will maximize the impact of AFINET on the sustainability of the farming systems in Europe helped by the almost 70 multipliers participating in the RAINs. The expansion of the AFINET main results will be reinforced through the collaboration with the almost 50 networks already found in the synergies that could be linked to AF. The participation of several AFINET members in the EIP-Agri Focus group entitled "Agroforestry: introducing woody vegetation into specialised crop and livestock systems" promoted by AFINET had also contributed to the increase of AF knowledge in Europe.