The primary mission of the project is to foster innovation, knowledge exchange and provide novel solutions to empower farmers in Europe and associated countries to deliver to multiple objectives: food production, carbon capture, and biodiversity. Agroforestry is an auspicious land use type, allowing farmers to continue producing food while significantly improving the environmental sustainability of their operations. Integration of trees into agricultural business contributes to a host of ecosystem services, lowering the environmental and social impact of food production. Past research has attempted to foster the renaissance of agroforestry in Europe, resulting in a sizeable knowledge base and modelling capability. The most critical barriers to agroforestry adoption in Europe relate to lack of knowledge, impact of tree planting on farm business, and unclear policy support positioned between agriculture and forestry. We will employ a co-creation and multi-actor approach as our fundamental research method to place agroforestry systems in the right balance of farm productivity, socio-economic viability and sustainability. We will maximise the use of existing knowledge and data, utilise agroforestry living labs built upon foundations laid by previous projects, and establish a stakeholder and actor engagement platform to enable knowledge transfer, training and innovation. This project will prioritise enhancing knowledge exchange and transfer, enabling the integration of carbon and biodiversity finance in farm business models, and by proposing targeted policy interventions as solutions to overcoming barriers to agroforestry expansion.

Agroforestery (AF) has already proven its potential for farm sustainability, climate change mitigation & adaptation, biodiversity preservation, and soil conservation. However, AF performances are context-dependent, and many barriers hinder its adoption, such as lack of tools for decision-making, assessing economic, environmental, social benefits, and monitoring of policies and their impact on AF. DigitAF will boost AF implementation in the EU and beyond thanks to the co-development of digital tools tailored to the needs and concerns of DigitAF target groups. To engage actors whose decisions impact AF implementation,DigitAF will: (1) Support policy-actors at various scales to design more efficient policies supporting AF adoption & carbon farming; (2) Provide tools helping practitioners (farmers…) deal with the complexity of AF systems. DigitAF will allow them to optimize the design and management of agroforestry systems at field and farm scale; (3) Enhance capacities of actors to assess, quantify and market the economic, environmental and social performance and benefits of AF. The end-user centred multi-actor approach of DigitAF will be made possible by implementing 6 living labs (LL) in Italy, Germany, Netherland, United Kingdom, Finland and the Czech Republic. Open-source tools will be co-developed thanks to the existing or novel practical knowledge, scientific evidence and models. They will be tested with the end-users from LL and improved thanks to their feedback. Larger dissemination to target groups will be ensured through DigitAF partners gathering members and networks across EU. DigitAF consortium brings together 25 partners from 20 countries from the EU, Associated Countries and beyond, composed of RTOs (9), universities (5), SMEs (6), European and international organisations (4), NGO and cooperative (1). DigitAF consortium and the LL cover all AF value chain actors, thus efficiently supporting AF implementation in the EU.