REFOREST: Agroforestry at the forefront of sustainable agriculture

The REFOREST project aims to find solutions to overcome the main obstacles to the expansion of European agroforestry. The project mission is to support innovation, exchange knowledge, and provide new solutions that will enable farmers in the EU and associated countries to meet various goals such as food production, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity.

The great news is that the main coordinator of this project is FFWS CZU. The consortium includes 14 institutions across Europe.

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 barriersto 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.

The project will use a co-creation and multi-actor approach as a fundamental research method to place agroforestry systems in the right balance of farm productivity, socio-economic viability and sustainability.

The aim of the project is to maximise the use of existing knowledge and data, utilise agroforestry living labs built upon foundationslaid 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.