Climate-resilient sunflower crops can help to reduce the EU dependency on imports of vegetable oils and proteins shifting towards sustainable alternatives, to mitigate the impact of agricultural production on water use and greenhouse gas emissions, to grow resources for pollinators, and to promote biodiversity. HelEx will generate the knowledge and use innovative tools to accelerate the breeding of sunflower varieties adapted to extreme drought and heat stresses, while improving their environmental impact and assessing their socio-economic value of the resulting innovations along the value chains. HelEx will thereby consider two related groups of traits increasingly impacted by climate change, i.e. the eco-systemic service to pollinators and seed quality. For this, HelEx brings together scientists, SMEs, and industries representing an international consortium of experts in sunflower ecology, physiology and genomics; plant biotechnology and breeding; pollinator biology and ecology; environmental impact assessment and feedstock processing; and socioeconomic assessment at different scales. This HelEx multi-disciplinary consortium will explore the genetic and molecular processes involved in tolerance to drought and heat in wild extremophile Helianthus species, and identify favorable wild alleles introgressed into cultivated sunflower, for seed quality and pollinator attractiveness resilience (WP1). These processes will be transfered using classical marker-assisted selection and innovative genome editing approaches (WP2), and the environmental and biodiversity impact of these new climate-smart sunflowers assessed (WP3). HelEx will investigate the socio-economic impact and benefits in relevant value chains for different feedstock (WP4). Our communication strategy (WP5) will engage a variety of societal stakeholders to ensure feedback and enhance project progress and outcomes, and make transparent the broader dimensions of plant biotechnology, biodiversity, and benefit sharing

Agrobiodiversity is a vital subset of biodiversity and is the result of the interaction between the environment, genetic resources and management systems used by culturally diverse people. It is a crucial prerequisite for ecologically and economically sustainable agricultural systems and is an important tool for ecological intensification. The aim of CROPDIVA is to reinforce agrobiodiversity on different levels and along distinct geographic and socio-economic areas. The activities of CROPDIVA are clustered around five connected research work packages and three pillars, each with a set of specific objectives: i) promotion of six key underutilised arable crops: oats, hull-less barley, triticale, buckwheat, faba bean and lupin; ii) creation of value chains for selected underutilised crops ; and iii) study of the socio-economic impact of project results. The concept of CROPDIVA is an innovative challenge driven approach based on the promotion of underutilised crops in sustainable cropping systems and new regional value chains. Project activities will focus on the following major challenges: improved resilience of cropping systems, alignment of the economic and social needs of farmers with ecological goals as well as marketing of new food/non-food products meeting consumer demands. The results gathered in CROPDIVA will not be descriptive, but will be used for innovative solutions along the entire food and non-food chain to enable biodiversity management on all levels, including diversifying the use of genetic resources, crop production systems, new food/non-food products, market opportunities while satisfying producers and investigated consumer requirements.

CARINA is built on a multi-actor consortium and participative decision-making process through mutual learning, transparent communication, and inclusive multi-perspectives and transdisciplinary engagement. From the proposal clearly emerges the importance of social innovation as the nerve center for the evolution of the whole project. Nine Lighthouses, 5 Living Labs, and 9 Policy Innovation Labs will be established across Europe playing a leading role in the co-creation of CARINA innovation actions. CARINA focuses on new sustainable and diversified farming systems including 2 new oilseed crops, carinata and camelina, able to provide multiple low iLUC feedstocks for the bio-based economy. We firmly believe that a participatory approach is necessary for successfully scaling-up innovative farming systems. Engaging farmers and other stakeholders in jointly developing solutions under specific environmental, technical, and social conditions has been highly considered in CARINA. We estimate about 3M farmers being potentially reached by CARINA thanks to the direct cooperation with its partners. To find a broad consensus by primary producers, a new crop should enable to promote and harness biodiversity, be easy-to-grow, and technically feasible within current cropping systems. Carinata and camelina fully meet these requirements, able to successfully grow almost everywhere in Europe and in northern Africa. Carinata and camelina provide high quality oils that will be transformed into innovative bio-based products (bioherbicides, bioplastics). The co-product from oil extraction is a protein-rich cake, which will be valorized as animal feed, and in a multitude of high added-value products, exploiting the mucilage and glucosinolates contained within. CARINA capitalizes on a highly experienced team of 20 partners, +6 affiliated entities, from 13 EU and Associated Countries (Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, UK, Serbia, Tunisia, Morocco, Switzerland).

AGROECOLOGY, the European Partnership ‘Accelerating Farming Systems Transition: Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures’, is an ambitious, large-scale European research and innovation endeavour between the EC and 26 Member States (MS), Associated Countries (AC) and Third Countries. AGROECOLOGY will support an agriculture sector that is fit to meet the targets and challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, food security and sovereignty, and the environment, while ensuring a profitable and attractive activity for farmers. Major change is needed to make the agriculture sector more sustainable, resilient and responsive to societal and policy demands. Agroecology builds on natural, biological interactions while using state-of-the-art science, technology and innovation based on farmers’ knowledge. It represents a promising approach with the potential to respond to challenges faced by the European agriculture sector and to meet its needs. Real-life testing and experimentation environments, living labs are an appropriate instrument to accelerate the agroecology transition. Research infrastructures will also contribute to making scientific knowledge on agroecology available for this transition. Together these instruments will allow for ambitious experimentation at different scales, merging science and practice, to provide science-based evidence on the effects of novel approaches and accelerate the agroecology transition. AGROECOLOGY will pool the resources of the EC and the states involved to fund high-level research generating appropriate knowledge and technologies aligned with the core themes described in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, while also implementing a series of supporting activities to inform, consult, advise and involve different stakeholders to build capacities, raise awareness and manage and exchange the knowledge and data created.