H2020 UNISECO Project: Understanding and Improving the Sustainability of Agroecological Farming Systems in the EU

The overall objective of UNISECO is to strengthen the sustainability of EU agricultural systems by jointly developing practice-proven strategies and incentives for promoting improved agroecological approaches. We will improve understanding of the socioeconomic and policy drivers and barriers to further development and implementation of agroecological approaches in EU agricultural systems to identify and facilitate more effective management strategies for European agriculture. This requires a broader systems perspective, considering the socioeconomic, ecological, and policy environments at the territorial level.

We will operationalize a socio-ecological systems framework that integrates external environments into an assessment of the sustainability of agricultural systems, paying particular attention to the role of different types of actors and their roles in subsystems. UNISECO will provide a set of methodological tools to assess the environmental, economic, and social impacts of innovative strategies and incentives for agroecological approaches in EU agricultural systems at the farm and territorial levels.

The methodological toolkit will be tested in participatory case studies in 15 European countries with diverse biophysical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural contexts of agricultural systems. UNISECO is committed to a genuinely transdisciplinary process, reflected in the composition of the consortium of stakeholders and scientific partners, and the emphasis on multi-stakeholder engagement.

The group learning processes, which integrate practical and theoretical knowledge, will benefit scientists, stakeholders, and end-users through a better understanding of how to strengthen the sustainability of EU agricultural systems. UNISECO addresses the topic of work program SFS-29-2017 and contributes to Sustainable Food Security by identifying and supporting agricultural systems that enable the production of healthy food while preserving the environment and providing added value to farming households and the different actors in the value chain.