NEXTFOOD will drive the crucial transition to more sustainable and competitive agrifood and forestry systems development by designing and implementing education and training systems to prepare budding or already practicing professionals with competencies to push the green shift in our rapidly changing society. NEXTFOOD will challenge the linear view of knowledge transfer as a top-down process from research to advice and practice, and support the transition to more learner-centric, participatory, action-based and action-oriented education and learning in agrifood and forestry systems. In several pioneering case studies, covering agrifood and forestry systems in Europe, Asia and Africa, farmers solve real challenges related to sustainability together with researchers, students and other relevant stakeholders while developing both green technical skills and soft collaborative competencies. NEXTFOOD will assure quality in research and education by creating a peer-review system for evaluation of practice-oriented research outputs focusing on sustainability and practical usefulness. In addition, we will develop an international accreditation framework for education and training in fields relevant to sustainable agrifood and forestry systems. An innovative action research process will guide the NEXTFOOD project’s development in a cyclical manner, ensuring that the research process and actual case studies are ever-improving. This will exemplify how practice-oriented research can be instrumental to achieve: better collaboration between university and society, more innovation in the agrifood and forestry systems sector, and a progressive agrifood community ready to tackle complex sustainability challenges of the 21st century

The overarching objective of UNISECO is to strengthen the sustainability of EU farming systems, through co-constructing practice-validated strategies and incentives for the promotion of improved agro-ecological approaches. We will enhance the understanding of socio-economic and policy drivers and barriers for further development and implementation of agro-ecological approaches in EU farming systems to identify and facilitate more effective management strategies for European agriculture. This requires a wider systems perspective, considering socio-economic, ecological and political settings at a territorial level. We will operationalise a socio-ecological systems framework that integrates external settings into a sustainability assessment of farming systems, paying particular attention to the role of different types of actors and their roles in sub-systems. UNISECO will provide a methodological toolkit to assess the environmental, economic and social impacts of innovative strategies and incentives for agro-ecological approaches in EU farming systems at farm and territorial levels. The methodological toolkit will be tested in participatory case studies in 15 European countries with different biophysical, socio-economic and socio-cultural contexts of farming systems. UNISECO is committed to a genuine transdisciplinary process, reflected in consortium composition of stakeholder and scientific partners, and the emphasis on multi-actor engagement. Group learning processes, integrating practical and theoretical knowledge, will benefit scientists, stakeholders and end-users through improved understanding on how to strengthen sustainability of EU farming systems. UNISECO addresses the work programme topic SFS-29-2017 and contributes to Sustainable Food Security by identifying and supporting farming systems that enable the production of healthy food while preserving the environment and bringing added value to farm households and the different stakeholders of the value chain.