Project description
A sustainable farming approach to resolve land use conflicts between energy and food
Competitive conflicts for land use between the energy and food sectors have emerged, posing challenges to sustainability. These conflicts could be mitigated by integrating renewable energy systems (RES) into farms through new circular business models. However, obstacles exist, hindering the adoption of this approach by agricultural communities. With this in mind, the EU-funded HarvRESt project aims to address barriers perceived by agricultural communities and enhance decision-making through an Agricultural Virtual Power Plant. This system will assess various scenarios to determine optimal RES solutions aligned to food production, providing tailored recommendations to farmers and policymakers. By fostering co-creation sessions and providing training materials, HarvRESt will empower farmers. Implemented across four diverse farm use cases, the project will act as a knowledge hub.
Objective
Competitive conflicts for land use between the energy and food sectors have appeared, which could be mitigated by the vertical integration of RES in farms through new circular business models. By this approach, farms will become climate neutral, optimising their production and reducing their impact on natural resources and biodiversity, on top of providing energy services to communities and diversifying their economic income. However, there is a need to identify, understand and overcome major existing barriers perceived by agricultural communities. Moreover, current initiatives do not to effectively consider and address the complex interactions and factors from the farming and RES context, thus missing to support decision making based on accurate projections, estimations and forecasts. HarvRESt will work on these needs by improving the existing knowledge and its fragmented status, which will be feed to an Agricultural Virtual Power Plant able to run different scenarios and farm configurations to determine the best operation procedures for a given RES solution. This data will be then provided to a decision support system able to weight trade-offs and key indicators to provide ad-hoc recommendations to farmers and policy makers, thus enabling the consecution of improved production rates on renewable energy, food & feed within agro communities. For the successful execution of HarvRESt and implementation of recommendations, a multi-actor approach fostering co-creation sessions together with the provision of training materials for farmers empowerment will be implemented. The full approach of HarvRESt will be supported and executed at 4 use cases representing different topologies of farms, a diversity of stakeholders and organizational structures, distinct geographical conditions and a wide variety of RES technologies. Together with HarvRESt community and mapped initiatives, the project will act as a hub for knowledge and best-practices on RES integration at farm level.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicstopology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL6-2023-CLIMATE-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
50018 Zaragoza
Spain