Six Desertification Innovation Partnerships have been set up in Cyprus, Italy (both sub-areas), Romania, Spain and Tunisia. Each has engaged at least twenty stakeholders through events focused on co-developing desertification-resilient futures and stakeholder engagement plans.
An online TERRASAFE GIS App, developed using Google Earth Engine, maps trends in land productivity and water use efficiency in the Cypriot, Romanian, Spanish and Tunisian pilot areas. It identifies sub-areas with contrasting trends, which were then field surveyed using a TERRASAFE-adapted evaluation tool for land degradation and land manager questionnaires. This enabled our partnerships to select land cover types and 3-5 pilot sites for field experiments. In Italy, where the focus is on depopulation and land abandonment, social science methods are taking place to understand how people are experiencing desertification.
Innovation partners developed proposals for selected land cover types and pilot sites in the four pilot areas, with three cost options per partner. Through stakeholder workshops, each partnership selected three proposals from 12–15 for field testing, alongside current practice and one traditional or organic practice. Selected proposals span all five innovation partners and cover the full range of innovations, including nature-based (biohydrogel, compost, Ecochar, Technosol), technological (real-time soil monitoring) and social (circular green waste management) approaches. These have already been implemented in rainfed barley fields in Cyprus, ahead of schedule, with initial site description and sampling completed following TERRASAFE’s harmonised monitoring framework.
A review of international and EU desertification-related policies informed a policy brief (February 2025: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14973166) identifying opportunities within existing and upcoming policies, including the Nature Restoration Law and Soil Monitoring Law.
TERRASAFE’s Communication, Awareness-raising, Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy has been developed and implemented through a wide range of activities, including a project identity, a website with over 25,000 page views from 6,191 users, 7 blogs, 15 videos, and two webinars with over 150 participants, including one with the MONALISA project. Funding has been secured for a child project applying the TERRASAFE approach in Portugal.
