Concept of this project

Path4Med is a multi-actor and participatory Innovation Action project composed of scientific experts in public institutions, solutions and services providers in private companies, farmers’ associations and land managers, and various stakeholders (technology providers, recipients, consumers, facilitators, water user associations, citizens etc.) and will achieve its objectives through co-learning and co-development to maximise the size, the importance, and the endurance of its impact long after the project completion. A set of 7 integrated, multisite, multiscale, and multidisciplinary Demonstration Sites Groups (DGs) involving 11 Demonstration Sites (DS) (Figure 1) that will be co-designed, implemented, and operated in critical regions in the Mediterranean and throughout Europe using the Living Labs approach and that will act as innovation incubators, ensuring the relevance and the pertinence of the project outcomes to the specific needs of all involved actors and will maximize the impact and the exploitation potential of the obtained results..

Figure 1. Path4Med partner countries and countries with Demonstration Sites.

 

Path4Med has six key sets of actions towards innovative pathways for sustainable agriculture and sufficient clean water in a changing climate:

1.           Identify, improve, adapt, and demonstrate agricultural (soil, water, nutrient) management technologies and solutions that are effective, feasible, accessible and available, adoptable, adaptable, and easily implementable within an inclusive and open participatory environment empowerment of citizens to take action against pollution of soils, waters and the ocean.

2.           Evolve and mainstream novel monitoring technologies and integrated solutions that i) closely track the effective implementation of the applied agricultural practices and environmental interventions and their actual impact in water bodies status from the source (soil, landscape) to the sea (surface water bodies, aquifers, sea), ii) enhance the traceability of pollutants in the agro-hydro-system and accurately quantify water and nutrients balance in agricultural catchments, and iii) improve the European Environmental Agency (EEA) information content accuracy and reliability and the related indicators adaptiveness, effectiveness and quality for data interpretation.

3.           Advance key cutting edge technologies and solutions born in the labs of the participating research providers that will build the foundations for future demonstration and upscaling activities on integrated innovative approaches forming the spearhead of future interventions.

4.           Assess the technical feasibility and socioeconomic viability of cascades of solutions in agriculture on preventing, reducing, and remediating soil and water pollution from excess nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) and in parallel with other emerging pollutants (plastics, nutrients, pesticides, and antibiotics) through an integrated modelling framework.

5.           Quantify the effectiveness and the net impact of these solutions on soil, water, sea health under current and future climate conditions from farm scale to catchment, country, and continental scale in order to effectively orientate future strategies and policies.