Research project REAGRY

Summary

Climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss are accelerating the need for sustainable agricultural solutions across Europe. While traditional land-use practices such as rotational grazing, agro-silvopastoral systems, and communal land management have long supported ecosystem stability, their integration into modern farming remains fragmented. The REAGRY project bridges traditional agricultural knowledge with scientific innovation, modernising and validating agroecological practices to support scalable, climate-resilient transitions across diverse European landscapes. A multi-actor, transdisciplinary approach is at the core of REAGRY. The project engages farmers, policymakers, researchers, and local communities through five Living Lab (LL) in Hungary, Romania, Spain, Turkey and Portugal. These LLs are embedded in pilot sites and function as participatory platforms for co-developing and testing context-specific practices. Each LL is supported by a farmer-led learning network, facilitating peer exchange and capturing regionally grounded knowledge. Pilot actions in each region evaluate agroecological methods under varying climatic and socio-economic conditions.

REAGRY directly supports the objectives of the Agroecology Call by promoting knowledge-based agroecological transitions, improving drought resilience, and enhancing biodiversity while ensuring economic viability for farmers. The integration of harmonised socio-economic and biodiversity monitoring ensures that findings are scientifically validated and adapted to real-world agricultural settings. REAGRY places particular emphasis on stakeholder engagement, detailing actor roles, learning processes, and incentive structures to maximise impact and replicability. One of REAGRY’s key strengths is its structured, scenario-based implementation, which builds from synthesizing pilot studies, environmental indicators, socioeconomic analyses and strategic communication, to produce actionable agroecological transition pathways across Europe.

By actively involving LL participants in this process, the project identifies potential barriers to adoption, from economic constraints to policy misalignments, and develops evidence-based solutions to overcome them. Scenario modelling tools will include process-based ecosystem models and bioeconomic simulations, ensuring that results inform long-term CAP reform and land use policy. This foresight-driven methodology provides a roadmap for integrating agroecological practices into diverse agricultural landscapes, ensuring a just and scalable transition. REAGRY will establish an open-access knowledge-sharing platform, facilitating the dissemination of best practices, biodiversity monitoring data, and scenario analyses. The project will actively engage with EU and national policymakers, providing policy recommendations to support agroecological subsidy reforms and financial incentives under CAP and the EU Green Deal. The final dissemination conference will be organised by P5 in parallel with the project’s closing meeting, providing a platform to share outcomes at EU level. LLs will continue to serve as demonstration platforms after the project, providing long-term access to tested agroecological practices, while regional partnerships will support their role as ongoing hubs for innovation, training, and policy engagement.

Top image: Buffalo. Source: Lola Virág Kiss