The FUTURAL project seeks to empower rural communities by addressing key societal, environmental, and economic challenges through innovative Smart Solutions (SS) across five domains: 1) Circular Bioeconomy, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management, 2) Climate Adaptation and Mitigation, 3) Resilience to Shocks, 4) Citizen Engagement and Quality of Life, and 5) Lifelong Education and Training. The project integrates co-creation and participatory approaches in six diverse Multi-Actor Pilots (MAPs) across Europe, tailored to the specific needs of rural stakeholders. FUTURAL’s SS, along with solutions from other EU projects, will be accessible through a Metasearch Platform, ensuring scalability and replication across rural areas.
The project’s main objective is to develop, test, and demonstrate community-led social, technological, and business innovations. It will deliver a set of digital SS developed in the project, together with solutions available from other initiatives and EU projects, to address key societal, environmental and financial challenges and empower rural communities to engage in change. Key objectives include:
Community-led innovations: Co-design, implement, monitor, and evaluate community-led social and business innovations based on digital smart solutions.
Smart Solutions: Test, pilot, and demonstrate the digital smart solutions for the 5 FUTURAL domains to address social and environmental challenges faced by rural communities.
Capacity Building: Strengthen the capacity of rural communities to realise the potential of community- led innovations based on the proposed SS.
Networking and Synergies: Establish synergies with rural innovator and CAP networks, smart villages, organisations, and other projects to enhance relations and knowledge exchange.
Scale-up: Propose policies and governance frameworks to maximise the project’s contribution in achieving future CAP objectives related to smart villages and develop business models to mainstream solutions.
FUTURAL aligns with the EU’s Green Deal, CAP objectives, and the Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas by strengthening climate resilience, conserving biodiversity, and promoting social inclusion. Its anticipated impacts include empowering rural communities to embrace digital innovations, tackling depopulation, and fostering greater societal engagement, all while contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Social sciences and humanities play a vital role in FUTURAL by ensuring that innovations are co-created with stakeholders to address diverse socio-cultural needs. Social sciences and humanities expertise enables the active involvement of rural citizens in the design, monitoring, and evaluation of Smart Solutions, fostering ownership, inclusivity, and sustainability. This approach ensures that the project’s outcomes are socially equitable, contextually relevant, and capable of driving meaningful change in rural communities.
