Download the slides from the event here

Background

Land-use changes are considered a root cause for many sustainability challenges, such as food security, climate change and biodiversity loss. Gaining deeper insights into the dynamics of land-use change and its underlying factors, together with assessing the effectiveness of different land management practices at various scales in providing sustainable solutions resemble important milestones and sustainable contribution to achieving necessary transformative change. Modern land- use strategies need to consider the wide variety of interests of key actors as well as multiple interactions, and trade-offs of factors that influence current land use and future decisions to be taken. Yet there are also synergies that may be achieved through a better understanding of the dynamics and requirements associated with land use, enabling decisions to be steered towards more socially oriented benefits.

It is from this need to achieve synergies and the importance of high-level decision-making, that the three European research projects, Europe-LAND, MOSAIC and PLUS Change, join forces to reach out to policy makers particularly on European level, i.e. creating a dedicated large-scale EU Science-Policy Dialogue platform to bring together relevant land-use stakeholders with the aim to foster the mutual dialogue on sustainable land use and land management. By this, the projects want to enable all participants to

• improve the joint understanding of the different perspectives and needs of policy and science, also paying attention to civil society perspectives, on European land use, land management and closely related fields;
• explore existing needs, constraints and opportunities and to identify appropriate solutions to effectively address existing challenges both on research and policy-making levels; and
• propose suitable approaches and concrete settings for the design and co-creation of sustainable land use strategies in close collaboration with policy-makers.

Initiated by Europe-LAND, the overall concept seeks to integrate a set of peculiar activities of all three projects, seizing synergies related to specific policy-related actions and utilizing distinctive strengths and capacities of each research project to bundle and, by this, increase the potential impact of otherwise individual project actions.

Agenda Science EU Policy Dialogue, 16 April 2024, 10-12 (CET) online

10:00 Official Welcome
(Prof Walter Leal, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Research and Transfer Centre Sustainable Development and Climate Change Management, Germany)

10:05 Welcoming Words – EU Mission on Adaptation to climate change (europa.eu)
(Federico Porrà, Policy Officer – Climate, DG RTD – Climate and Planetary Boundaries  (RTD.B3)

10:10 Towards sustainable land use + land management in Europe – introducing the Horizon Europe project Europe-LAND
(Franziska Wolf, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany)

10:30 Innovative and Effective Policies for Sustainable Land Use – introducing the Horizon Europe Project MOSAIC and the Policy Lab approach
(Dieter Cuypers, VITO, Belgium and Mónica Vidal, Eurosite, EU)

10:45 Meeting biodiversity, climate and social objectives in a changing world – introducing the Horizon Europe Project PLUS-Change
(Prof Julia Mildorfova Leventon, CzechGlobe, Czech Republic)

11:00 Introduction into the overall Science EU Policy Dialogue Process (by facilitator)

11:15 Parallel Co-Creation Sessions

Technical facilitation: Jasmin Röseler, Dominique da Silva, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany

• ROOM A: EU projects; Expert facilitation: Prof Julia Mildorfova Leventon, CzechGlobe, Czech Republic, Franziska Wolf, HAW Hamburg, Germany
• ROOM B: EU representatives; Expert faciliatation: Dieter Cuypers, VITO, Belgium; Vincent O’Connell, PURPLE Network, Belgium

11:50 Brief Summary of the day

• Rapporteur PLUSChange on Results Room A (Prof Julia Mildorfova Leventon, CzechGlobe, Czech Republic)
• Rapporteur MOSAIC on Results Room B (Dieter Cuypers, VITO, Belgium; Vincent O’Connell, PURPLE Network, Belgium)
• Outlook on upcoming results and follow-up action in 2025 (Franziska Wolf, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg)

12:00 Closing of the event