Project description
Irrigation solutions for resilient to water scarcity agriculture
Extreme weather patterns in the EU, characterised by more frequent droughts and floods, are becoming increasingly common. If left unaddressed, water scarcity could lead to significant annual losses and affect 17 % of the population by 2050. The EU-funded RAINS project aims to improve the resilience of EU agriculture to water scarcity by implementing ten innovative solutions focused on irrigation practices and technologies. These solutions will enhance water and nutrient management while mitigating the effects of extreme weather. Key components include alternative water supply methods, biofertilisers, improved soil water retention and advanced tools such as Optifangs-IA and WaterIQ for better irrigation management. The project will showcase these solutions on 10 farms across Greece and Spain, reflecting a variety of agricultural practices.
Objective
In the last years, extreme weather patterns of water scarcity (droughts) and water abundance (floods, rapid showers) are becoming more frequent and prolonged in the EU. If we do not remedy this situation, by 2050 water scarcity will lead to €12,2 billion losses per year and affect 17% of EU population.
RAINS will contribute to improve the resilience of EU agriculture to water scarcity by demonstrating 10 solutions (irrigation practices, technologies and tools) that will increase the efficiency of water and nutrient management in agriculture and reduce the impact of extreme weather events. RAINS solutions include alternative forms of water supply, combined use of water and biofertilisers, improved soil water-retention, water-N/P modelling and some smart solutions (Optifangs-IA, WaterIQ) to contribute to decision-making and to integrated irrigation management across farm systems. Solutions will be demonstrated at 10 demo-farm systems representing agroecology, organic production, conventional, intensive and urban agriculture, replicated in Greece and Spain. We will also develop a hydrological and N/P model to optimised agriculture production at catchment level. A well, we will conduct co-creation workshops, knowledge transfer activities and create materials such as guidelines (2), White Papers (2) and Practice Abstracts (40). Policy focused sessions will deliver 3 sets of policy and incentives recommendations, engaging quadruple helix agricultural stakeholders, to pave the way for the uptake of sustainable irrigation and fertilization management solutions in practice in the EU.
In the long term, RAINS will contribute to improve water efficiency by 50% in 12,700 ha. in more than 20 EU regions, and support >500 farmers in the transition to a more sustainable irrigation. And by 2050, the implementation of the RAINS project will save up to €6.1 billion, 244.348 million litres of water and 35.4 t CO2 eq. avoided emissions.
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.
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringwater engineeringirrigation
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
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Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL6-2024-CLIMATE-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
46003 VALENCIA
Spain