TRANSFORM: Transformative Rotations for AdaptatioN and Sustainable Future, Outcome and Resilience Mapping

The vision of the HORIZON-MISS-2023-CLIMA-01-01 call is that Europe’s Regions will be responsible for their sustainable and resilient adaptation to climate change (CC), by developing Roadmaps for adaptation of agriculture to CC. These roadmaps will need to empower regional stakeholders to innovate new, nature-based solutions that meet society’s needs for CC adaptation through better planning that is compatible with national and international policy. TRANSFORM proposes that innovating new crop rotations – the sequences of crops that farmers use to achieve their farming goals – will deliver nature-based solutions for sustainable and resilient CC adaptation in arable and mixed farming. Working in the Atlantic Biogeographic Region (Bio-region) of Europe, we adopt an explicitly multi-actor approach in which stakeholders are in charge of the innovation. TRANSFORM will co-create with stakeholders tools and methods: for Regional-level Roadmaps that describe the needs for adaptation of local people in agriculture; for farmers to innovate crop rotations for their region using the Future Rotations Explorer tool; and, a Toolbox of spatio-temporal methods and tools for stakeholders to explore and evaluate the societal, economic and environmental indicators of impact of rotations. When embedded within our social science methods, these methods and tools will leverage an iterative ‘pipeline to innovation’ for CC adaptation in agriculture that produces lists of acceptable crop rotations, and maps for planning, across the Atlantic Bio-region, and ultimately the whole of Europe. This will allow the European Commission, EU Member States and associated countries and their regions and stakeholders to make progress in attaining the goals of the EU Mission: Adaptation to Climate Change.