Modelling land use and land management in the context of climate change

To ensure the sustainable management of land resources in the long term there is a need for an integrated framework that addresses society's objectives appropriately by understanding the trade-offs between uses and by incentivising actions / behaviours / investments contributing to desirable targets. Land use and management has a key role to play in Europe in terms of boosting carbon storage, producing biomass for the bioeconomy, reducing urban sprawl and attaining the objective of climate neutrality by 2050 while ensuring food and nutrition security, biodiversity commitments and well-being in general. There are however substantial knowledge gaps regarding, in particular, the understanding of the impacts of farming / forestry practices at various scales, from local to global, and the capacity to model these impacts (economic and environmental). Work should include the analysis of land use dynamics and trends between arable land, permanent grassland, land abandonment / marginal lands, forest areas, for which quantifications and an identification of drivers and impacts should be done in an integrated manner.

Projects should:

• work on land use dynamics and explore the effects of policy measures that can influence such dynamics, in particular agricultural, land use and climate policies.
• focus activities mainly on agriculture and forest land use/cover and should extend to interactions of the former with other main land uses/covers and drivers. This should ensure usability of the results in larger contexts. While focusing on Europe, proposals are encouraged to draw on good examples from elsewhere.
• work at various spatial scales – farm level, regional to EU levels - and simulations and projections should range from medium-term to long-term policy scenarios and should cover the whole of the EU and its Member States and possibly Associated Countries.
• The possible participation of the JRC in the projects will ensure that the proposed approach will be compatible with and/or improve existing databases and tools used at the European Commission and ensure open access to data.
• include a task to collaborate with other projects financed under this topic and under topic HORIZON-CL6-2021-GOVERNANCE-01-12 “EU agriculture within a safe and just operating space and planetary boundaries”. They should also liaise with relevant Horizon 2020 modelling projects (including LandSupport[[ https://www.landsupport.eu/]]).

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.