European soils face pressing conditions for their health. An alarming 60-70% of EU soils are considered unhealthy, attributed to factors such as pollution, urbanization, and intensive agriculture, further exacerbated by climate change. This degradation results in economic, societal, and environmental repercussions, including decreased land productivity, migration, land abandonment, and biodiversity loss. Addressing this challenge necessitates holistic measures, especially since soil restoration can take centuries. The project initiative, aligning with various EU policies, emphasizes the importance of comprehensive soil restoration efforts. It plans to establish six Soil Health Living Labs (SHELLs) across diverse EU climatic zones, including Sweden, Spain, Spain-France, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria. These labs are envisioned as innovation hubs, tailored to address the EU's specific soil health objectives, notably objectives 4, 6, and 8. Through collaborative efforts within these SHELLs, the goal is to develop, test, and validate potential solutions, ensuring scalability beyond their immediate regions. iCOSHELLs places a strong emphasis on inclusive stakeholder engagement, from researchers to landowners. Its systematic approach includes building stakeholder capacities, bridging gaps between science and practical applications, deepening understanding of soil indicators, replicating effective soil recovery methods, and championing supportive soil health policies. Additionally, iCOSHELLs seeks to redefine the concept of Living Labs (LLs). Challenging the traditional model, which often revolves around isolated research entities, iCOSHELLs envisions LLs rooted in co-creation, broad engagement, and real-world application. This transformative vision aims to evolve existing SHELLs into standardized, widely recognized labs, setting a foundational blueprint for future LLs. Moreover, as a comprehensive soil data repository, iCOSHELLs promotes collaboration, ensuring replicable.

Agro2Circular (A2C) project is focused on the implementation of the first territorial systemic solution for the upcycling of most relevant residues in the agrifood sector (fruits& vegetables and plastic multilayers) into high added value products, powered by a digital tool and constructed upon a systemic approach with high replicable/scalable potential. Through this solution, A2C will face important industrial, economic & social challenges in the agrifood sector: 1) The fruits & vegetables (F&V) are the group of major contribution to food waste along the food supply chain rising up to > 40% of waste, and are as excellent source of natural bioactives. However, these F&V wastes are not exploited. A2C will valorise them by green routes to obtain these bioactives for the production of nutraceuticals, functional foods, and cosmetics. 3) Multilayer plastic films are widely used as industrial packaging for the protection of food and agriculture for crops due to their unique barrier properties. However, there is a lack of sorting and recycling technologies for an economic and environmentally sustainable valorisation of these multilayer structures. A2C will develop the first recycling value chain for post-industrial multilayer films based on a synergistic approach combining innovative sorting, physical delamination, enzymatic depolymerisation, decontamination & mechanical recycling. 3) There is a lack of digitalisation in the agrifood sector. A2C will implement a Data Integration System (DIS) as a digital tool for ensuring traceability and as Predictive Decision Tool in the agrifood sector. A2C will be a demonstrated in the Regi?n de Murcia (Spain) and replicable systemic solution throughout Europe for the territorial deployment of the circular economy.

Tomato is a paradigm of crop domestication: a widely cultivated and consumed vegetable but with reduced genetic diversity and therefore highly vulnerable to emerging diseases and climate change. Fortunately, tomato is rich in genetic resources and information to overcome those difficulties and a coalition of scientists and breeding experts which have generated a large amount of this information have been organized under an effective management structure and a series of objectives to overcome those threats. HARNESSTOM aims to demonstrate that increasing use of Genetic Resources is key for food safety and security and can lead to innovation and benefit all stakeholders. By capitalizing on the large effort done recently in several EU-funded projects to connect phenotypes/genotypes in a large number of accessions from different germplasm banks and academia, HARNESSTOM will first collect, centralize and normalize this wealth of information in a way that is easily searchable and displayed in a user-friendly manner adapted to different type of users. Second, HARNESSTOM will develop four prebreeding programs addressing the major challenges of the field: 1) introducing resistances against major emerging diseases, 2) improving tomato tolerance to climate change, 3) improving quality 4) increasing resilience in traditional European tomato by participatory breeding. And additional goal is to increase speed and efficiency in prebreeding what is needed to be able to respond to the emerging challenges in a timely and effective manner. Joint leadership of both academia and industry in each of the WP and the participation of two NGOs representing different stakeholders guarantees the results of the project will have an impact in industry innovation and also in the society. An efficient management and outreach and communication platform is also in place to make sure the project runs smoothly and the interests of all stakeholders are protected

Europe’s horticultural production systems face 3 main sustainability problems: i) continued reliance on peat growing media, and drawbacks of current peat alternatives; ii) inefficient or inappropriate use of agricultural inputs; iii) suboptimal soil health due to unsustainable management practices. The multi-actor project Hort2thefuture will address these 3 challenges over 4 years with research, supplier, retail, and grower partners representing 11 European countries. Activities are divided between 7 Work Packages corresponding to the project's key objectives, together with project management. The objectives are to: (1) develop a methodological framework and tools for effective sustainability/Life Cycle Assessment analysis, (2) create and foster the commercial uptake of relatively low-cost, reliable, scalable growing media in horticulture, using EU-sourced raw materials, having substantially lower carbon and environmental footprints than peat, (3) develop and commercialise novel products and production systems that reduce input use in horticulture, (4) develop and commercialise novel products that improve soil structure and mitigate soil compaction in horticulture, (5) facilitate behavioural change to more sustainable practices through Living Labs and policy measures, and (6) communicate, disseminate & exploit project results effectively to 7 stakeholder audiences, raising soil literacy. The project will deliver outputs at TRL5-7 for Decision Support and LCA tools, an in planta nitrate monitoring electrode, new peat-free alternatives being commercialised, based on wood fibre, nano/micro-irrigation products developed to improve irrigation efficiency and soil health, as well as commercialised biological, chemical and mechanical solutions to reduce/prevent soil compaction, restore compacted soils and improve soil structure. These outcomes will help realise Mission: Soil health objectives, involving stakeholders along the whole agri-food chain and cooperation with FAO.

The project aims to address land degradation recovery from a multi-point of view, leveraging cooperation, experience-sharing and skills transfer as core approaches among several EU partners countries with important agricultural potential. The project target is to contribute towards reaching the 15th Sustainable Development Goal of United Nations in the partner countries. This will be achieved by intensifying innovative international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration in research and innovation that is already in place between partners through staff exchanges and sharing knowledge and ideas at all stages of the innovation chain. HumResLand (Human Resilient Networks towards Halting and Reversing Land Degradation for Ensuring Food Security) is a project based on previous collaborations between some of the partners and aims to contribute to excellent research and to foster border-crossing and transdisciplinary research cooperation, helping to shape a culture of research and innovation that facilitates the transformation of ideas into novel services and processes. It will involve research, technical, administrative and managerial staff supporting R&I activities. The key of the project lies in the transfer of knowledge on halting and reversing land degradation by validating and disseminating information among all partners and towards beneficiaries. The network we will create shall aim to develop a deep understanding of the way land degradation can be assessed, modelled, and integrated in the framework of sustainable management scenarios, strategies and policies. These will rely on fostering international human resource links as resiliency method against food security threats posed by land degradation. Even if some land studies have been done so far, the importance and complexity of the problem of degraded land requires a multilateral study, which simultaneously includes multidisciplinary approaches provided by specialists.