HORIZON EUROPE TERBN Project: EUROPEAN THEMATIC NETWORK OF RURAL BIOECONOMY

Type Project
Status Signed
Execution 2025 -2027
Assigned Budget 2.999.886,25 €
Scope Europeo
Autonomous community Castilla y León; Madrid, Comunidad de
Main source of financing Horizon Europe 2021-2027
Project website https://doi.org/10.3030/101182955

Description

Efforts to implement sustainable solutions often face significant challenges among smaller actors, such as farmers and foresters, who are hampered by time and financial constraints. The EU-funded thERBN project aims to address these obstacles by creating an EU-wide multi-stakeholder thematic network. This network will facilitate accessible knowledge sharing of innovative circular bioeconomy (CB) solutions tailored to smallholder farms and foresters in rural areas. By providing practical CB solutions and a support framework, the project will empower these professionals to adopt sustainable practices, overcome daily challenges, and benefit from the transition to a circular bioeconomy.

Objectives

The objective of tERBN is to operationalize an EU-wide multi-stakeholder (MS) Thematic Network (RT) for knowledge exchange on innovative solutions for a sustainable circular bioeconomy (CB) applicable by smallholders and foresters (practitioners) at local scale in rural areas. This framework will contribute to empowering practitioners (PPs) to address the gap between available and feasible BC solutions and the problems they face in their daily work. Starting from their most urgent needs in the management and use of bio-by-products and waste, tERBN will identify existing PP-based solutions, innovations developed by Operational Groups (OGs), and applied research results from national and EU projects, in order to produce easy-to-understand, practical materials to be shared at national and EU demonstration and training days and through the most consulted channels by PPs.

The tERBN Transformation Network will ensure open access to long-term digital structures such as the EU-Farmbook and the EU-CAP Network, complemented by the tERBN platform to facilitate multilingual access and a social environment enabling interaction and integration between Organizational Groups (OGs), Transformation Networks, and project communities interested in cross-border cooperation. This will enhance the cross-border dimensions and effects of the tERBN Transformation Network and reduce knowledge and innovation fragmentation. The tERBN Transformation Network will connect key actors (researchers, advisors, innovation facilitators) and structures (national and regional knowledge and information systems (AKIS), extension services, advisory networks) needed to drive the transition of smallholder rural farms and foresters towards climate-neutrality and more sustainable and resilient operations.

The bottom-up dialogue, based on the Management of Management, will generate evidence on current needs of smallholders, remaining gaps in cross-border cooperation solutions that new innovative products and services can address, and policy briefs proposing policies or instruments to support the adoption of small-scale cross-border cooperation solutions by smallholders.

Coordinators